Colin Coulter - Ireland Under Austerity: Neoliberal Crisis, Neoliberal Solutions

Manchester University Press

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ISBN 978 0 7190 9198 8

First published 2015

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The magnetic power which ideologies exert over human beings, while they have become entirely threadbare, is to be explained beyond psychology, in the objectively determined decay of logical evidence as such. It has come to the point that lies sound like truth, and truth like lies. Every statement, every news report, every thought is preformed by the centers of the culture-industry. What does not bear the trusted mark of such preformation lacks credibility in advance, all the more so that the institutions of public opinion garnish what they send out with a thousand factual proofs and all the power of conviction which the total apparatus can bring to bear. The truth which would like to do something against this, bears the character of something improbable

Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from damaged life, 1951

The precious advantage which the spectacle has acquired through the outlawing of history, from having driven the recent past into hiding, and from having made everyone forget the spirit of history within society, is above all the ability to cover its own tracks to conceal the very progress of its recent world conquest. Its power already seems familiar, as if it had always been there. All usurpers have shared this aim: to make us forget that they have only just arrived.

Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, 1988

If it feels like theres nothing new under the sun, thats because there is nothing new under the sun.

Luke Haines, Post Everything: Outsider Rock and Roll, 2012

Kieran Allen is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, University College Dublin. Among his books are The Corporate Takeover of Ireland (Dublin: Irish Acdemic Press, 2007), Irelands Economic Crash: A Radical Agenda for Change (Dublin: The Liffey Press, 2009) and the co-authored (with Brian OBoyle) volume Austerity Ireland: The Failure of Irish Capitalism (London: Pluto, 2013).

Francisco Arqueros-Fernndez holds a PhD from the Department of Anthropology, Maynooth University, Ireland and is presently conducting postdoctoral work in the Department of Sociology in the same institution. His current research project is funded by the Irish Research Council and examines the experience of unemployment in Spain and Ireland.

John Bissett is a community worker based in south inner city Dublin. The author of Regeneration: Public Good or Private Profit? (Dublin: New Island, 2008), he is a central figure in the community based arts protest initiative The Spectacle of Defiance and Hope (www.facebook.com/spectacle.defiance).

Colin Coulter is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Maynooth University, Ireland. Among his previous publications is the edited volume The End of Irish History? Critical Reflections on the Celtic Tiger (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003).

Michael Cronin holds a Personal Chair in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Dublin City University. He is the author of numerous publications on Irish society, language, and culture, including Translation in the Digital Age (London: Routledge, 2012). Michael is co-editor of The Irish Review and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy.

Daniel Finn is a journalist and historian from Dublin. He holds a doctorate from University College Cork and is deputy editor of the New Left Review.

Sinad Kennedy is a Marxist and feminist activist. She teaches in the School of English, Theatre and Media Studies at Maynooth University, Ireland. She is one of the editors of the forthcoming The Abortion Papers Volume 2 and is currently completing a book on Marxism, Feminism and Neoliberalism.

Conor McCabe is Research Fellow in the Equality Studies Centre, University College Dublin. He is the author of Sins of the Father: Tracing the decisions that shaped the Irish Economy (Dublin: History Press, 2nd edn, 2013) and writes at www.dublinopinion.com.

Angela Nagle is a PhD graduate from Dublin City University and a contributor to the Atlantic and Dublin Review of Books. Her research is concerned with online subcultures and the political economy of the internet.

Alison Spillane is a reproductive rights activist, and has been involved with both the Abortion Rights Campaign and Action on X. Until September 2014 she worked as a parliamentary researcher in Dil ireann. Alison previously held a co-ordinator position with the Irish Feminist Network, where she focused predominately on reproductive rights and gendered economic inequality.

Michael Taft is Research Officer for Unite the Union (Ireland) and is author of the political economy blog, Unites Notes on the Front (www.notesonthefront.typepad.com).

Gavan Titley lectures in the Department of Media Studies, Maynooth University, Ireland. His research broadly focuses on racism and multiculturalism in Western Europe. His books include The Crises of Multiculturalism: Racism in a Neoliberal Age (with Alana Lentin, London: Zed 2011) and the edited collection National Conversations? Public Service Media and Cultural Diversity (Bristol: Intellect 2014).

The editors wish to acknowledge the generous support offered by both Maynooth University and the National University of Ireland in the form of grants to facilitate the publication of this book.

In the closing days of October 2013, Dublin hosted a major gathering at which technology corporations at various stages of development exhibited their wares and explored investment opportunities. Although only in its fourth year, the Web Summit had grown at a remarkable rate and was now capable of attracting 9834 attendees from 97 countries around the world. Over the course of the 45-minute session, the founder of a range of companies most notably the online payment facility Paypal, the electric car company Tesla Motors and the space exploration undertaking named, appropriately, SpaceX was feted with a sequence of breathless testimonies to the vision and courage he has seemingly brought to the business world. In response, the evidently discomfited Musk offered a series of disarmingly earnest monologues, the tone of which was offset by that of the contributor seated immediately beside him, the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Enda Kenny. The Fine Gael leader seized his quite explicit position down the billing as an opportunity to act as a comic foil to the South African web capitalist, offering himself as the genial ageing luddite who has somehow stumbled into a gathering of the technologically adept whose arcane vocabulary has left him befuddled.