Joe WHELAN, Hidden Voices: Lived Experiences in the Irish Welfare Space
Whelan, Joe, Bristol, UK: Policy Press, 2022, 198 p., ISBN 9781447360926. Hardback: £85.00
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1What is it like to be poor and on benefits in an affluent democratic society in a context of permanent austerity and with the fading of redistributive politics? Based on in-depth interviews with 19 working-age people receiving different types of welfare payments in Ireland, Joe Whelan’s Hidden Voices: Lived Experiences in the Irish Welfare Space responds to this question, presenting a vivid picture of living a life on social welfare payments (both social insurance and assistance schemes) in Ireland. The book brilliantly reveals welfare recipients’ perceptions of how they are viewed through the eyes of politicians, street-level bureaucrats, friends and neighbours, and the rest of society. Whelan sheds light on how income support schemes have morphed into the opposite of what they were supposed to be: a source of income security. The contemporary experiences of welfare recipients are characterised by unpredictable benefit cuts and unexpected income fluctuations. Whelan also demonstrates individual-level outcomes of the current organisation of social welfare by relating rather disturbing stories of internalised second-class citizenship and the perception of self as a failure. His analysis adopts a latent thematic approach, which is reflected in the way he has organised the empirical chapters around key themes: marginality and liminality, work ethic, conditionality, compliance, and deservingness.
2Whelan also takes a context-sensitive and historical approach, characterising Ireland as a ‘liberal welfare state’ that has ‘some corporatist features through limited social insurance’ (p. 31). He explains how the interests of the Catholic Church played a key role in shaping the Irish social policy landscape, which still exhibits a skewed mix of social services and cash benefits, and a comparatively low level of welfare generosity. The social policy landscape that sets the stage for the lived experiences of the poor discussed in this book dates back to the 1980s and 1990s, when additional income support programmes were launched and the first signs of behavioural control mechanisms in social policy emerged. Whelan describes these mechanisms as part of a ‘formative turn towards activation’ (p. 22). First, he mentions that new non-contributory social assistance schemes such as the Disability Allowance and One-Parent Family Payment programme in the 1990s expanded the size of social expenditures in Ireland and the level of social protection that the country provides. Second, with the 2007–2008 global financial crisis, Irish policymakers put an end to the expansion in social spending and protection, enacted considerable welfare cuts, and increased the severity of behavioural controls on welfare recipients. The political outcome of this process was the birth of ‘the punitive Irish welfare state’ and ‘the death of ideas’ in welfare politics (p. 29). The COVID-19 pandemic challenged this model, but whether it will have a transformative impact is yet to be seen.
3One of the book’s strengths is its description of how policy decisions at the macro level shape individual experiences at the micro level. It explains, for example, how the amount of welfare benefits has direct implications for recipients’ ability to participate meaningfully in society. This meaningful participation takes socially desirable forms such as having their children participate in sports and other forms of consumption that are deemed normal for those who can afford them but are perceived as unacceptable for those ‘on the doles’—ordering a takeaway pizza, for instance. In other words, recipients are placed ‘on the margins’ of society when the amount of income support for the poor is low (p. 34). The book vividly describes people’s feelings of being trapped in a ‘liminal’ state of wanting to change their living conditions for the better but not having the means for making that change. As one of Whelan’s informants states, the tension that arises from this contradiction manifests itself as ‘self-scrutiny’ and ‘self-doubt’ (p. 38). An important takeaway is that the adequacy of income support should not be determined solely on minimum survival needs if the support is expected to empower the recipients.
4Another merit of the book is that it reveals how statutory entitlements become a matter for negotiation between street-level bureaucrats and welfare recipients. Although Whelan did not conduct interviews with officials for his study, his interviews with welfare recipients shed light on the intricate interactions between street-level bureaucrats and assistance beneficiaries. He maintains that the relationship between the two is more complex than it might seem. For example, in the eyes of welfare recipients, local bureaucrats are powerful players that can obstruct their access to benefits. Informants generally believe that the bureaucrats perform more than a technical role and that they often exercise discretion based on their subjective moral evaluation of recipients’ behaviours (p. 75). For this reason, welfare recipients sometimes have to engage in ‘impression management’ in order to continue receiving income support. These impression management practices are not always successful, however. To exemplify, Whelan includes several cases of benefit cutbacks that informants believed were unjustified. His rich material and deep analysis of the relationship between bureaucrats and welfare recipients should be primarily valued for their contribution to the literature on street-level bureaucracy.
5Yet another significant contribution of the book is its depiction of privacy violations experienced by welfare recipients that result from the way social assistance schemes are set up. The setup covers the application process, regular behavioural checks, and the terms under which people can access their cash benefits. One subtle instance of the violation of privacy that Whelan mentions is having to collect social welfare payments at the local post office and being ‘on display’ in their own neighbourhood as they wait at the counter to collect the payment (p. 84). Whelan found that some informants consider these and similar practices invasive and demeaning. One might find it surprising that beneficiaries’ concerns about such issues have been largely ignored by the general public and by policymakers, especially given that the right to privacy has received considerable public attention and legal intervention both in Ireland and in the European Union since the mid-2010s.
6The richness of the data presented in this book would have allowed for several other analyses. Few informants in the sample received disability-related benefits, so Whelan could have explored the data from those interviews separately and in more depth to get a disability perspective. This would have allowed him to then take an intersectional perspective, incorporate the experience of disability into his otherwise excellent analysis, and explore the impact of disability on the attitudes, experiences, and strategies of welfare recipients. By engaging with the disability studies literature, which offers abundant reflections on the disability–welfare nexus, he could have provided a disability-sensitive analysis.
7An intergenerational angle would have been yet another interesting avenue to explore. The individual stories in this snapshot study of diverse individuals, who are linked only by their status as recipients of cash benefits, offer a trove of valuable information on intergenerational family practices (as they relate to social welfare) that could be pursued in further analysis and in future research. It would be interesting to explore, perhaps in a longitudinal study, whether and how intergenerational social mobility influences the views and experiences of welfare beneficiaries.
8By providing a space for Hidden Voices to be heard and by advocating for the inclusion of lived experience as a valid form of knowledge in politics and policymaking, Whelan makes a valuable intellectual contribution to the political project of establishing ‘an inclusive and developmental welfare state’ (p. 151) in Ireland and beyond. His book offers a rich vocabulary for future research on the complex attitudes, experiences, and strategies of welfare recipients. It is also a welcome addition to the expanding body of literature on Irish social policy. Beyond that, it has broader relevance for the lived experiences of welfare recipients, especially in other liberal welfare states. In the end, the book does not leave us stranded in a dystopia. It expresses a much-needed invitation to imagine beyond a residualist welfare model that puts inadequate rates of income support at its core and to recall the merits of universalism in social services. Whelan’s book shows what the sociology of social policy can accomplish with a bottom-up approach to the dynamics of poverty, inequality, and social policy. Hidden Voices: Lived Experiences in the Irish Welfare Space will be relevant for both academics and students who work on social policy in Ireland and are interested in hearing the lived experiences of people on social welfare in affluent democracies.
References
Bibliographical reference
Volkan Yilmaz, “Joe WHELAN, Hidden Voices: Lived Experiences in the Irish Welfare Space”, International Review of Public Policy, 5:1 | 2023, 113-116.
Electronic reference
Volkan Yilmaz, “Joe WHELAN, Hidden Voices: Lived Experiences in the Irish Welfare Space”, International Review of Public Policy [Online], 5:1 | 2023, Online since 01 April 2023, connection on 21 June 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/irpp/3311; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/irpp.3311
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