About this book

This is a book about lived experiences in the context of welfare recipiency in Ireland. As such, my primary wish as an author is to present, unblemished and unvarnished, the experiences of others. Through the construction of several themes that form the empirical chapters of this book, I hope to have done this in a way that offers both depth of understanding and some useful lenses to help guide and contextualise that understanding without ‘over-theorising’ it. Therefore, it is hoped that readers will gain a real and visceral sense of the everyday lived realities of those whose words describe that reality. I think that this is an important and worthy undertaking, not least because lived experience as a form of knowledge is something that I wish to champion and something that can often be overlooked or measured against criteria that miss the inherent nature and value of what a knowledge of lived experiences can offer. The idea of lived experience as a valid and valuable form of knowledge is something that is growing in the context of scholarly work concerned with welfare and welfare states, and this will be made evident through the rich variety of literature referenced in this text. It is the hope that what is offered here adds to this growing cannon.

The research presented here is drawn from the Irish example and is very much presented as a ‘case study’ that stands on its own. The empirical materials presented further on are the outcome of a study that offers a ‘deep dive’ into a relatively specific and ‘slow-moving’ social milieu. Therefore, this text is not strictly intended to be comparative. However, the materials used to ground this study come from a variety of jurisdictions, and so the book will have relevance to international readers. Moreover, I argue that the experiences presented are potentially ‘shared typical’ in nature, and so have resonance in other jurisdictions and particularly in jurisdictions where cognate welfare systems persist. The vast majority of empirical material presented in this book comes from data that were gathered after the 2007-08 global financial crisis and before the 2020 global COVID-19 outbreak, and therefore reflect experiences of welfare recipiency that predate the changes seen in welfare states both at the onset and during the pandemic.