Courses / Module

This module aims to provide a summary history of the welfare state in Ireland over the past 200 years, related to periods or phases of development, to encourage and enable students to pose and answer important questions about how the Irish welfare state has developed to the present level; to show how social policy provisions and social policy issues today reflect developments, debates and decisions in the past; to develop a critical understanding of the methods of historical fact-finding and the possibilities and hazards of historical analysis. It will also explore the historical relationship between inequalities, particularly those relating to class and gender, and social policy.