A sleight of hand? The problematisation of youth unemployment in Ireland 2008-2014
Date
2022-02-07Author
Gaffney, Stephen
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Abstract
This PhD thesis presents the results of a research project investigating youth unemployment’s representation as a policy problem in Ireland during the period of 2008-2014. It focuses on two policies explicitly targeted at the young unemployed:
❖ The introduction and expansion of reduced rates of Jobseekers’ Allowance for those aged 18-25 in successive Social Welfare and Pensions acts between 2009 and 2013.
❖ The development of an implementation plan for the European Youth Guarantee in Ireland in 2013.
The project interrogates the assumptions at play within these policies, the proposed alternatives, and the extent to which these policies were contested within Irish policymaking, politics, and the media.
The study uses a critical policy analysis methodological framework developed by Bacchi (2009) entitled ‘What’s the problem represented to be?’ combined with research tools and methods developed within the field of Critical Discourse Studies. The data analysed was collated from three fields: policy literature produced by international and domestic actors prescribing policy responses in the Irish context; the Irish parliamentary system; and Irish print, televised and social media. This research was further supplemented by an archival investigation examining the problematisation of youth unemployment within Irish policy between the 1930s and 1990s.
The project finds the hegemonic approach, among authorities in Ireland and international organisations such as the European Union and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, located the problem of youth unemployment at the level of supposed deficiencies of young people themselves, while backgrounding or silencing alternative problematisation(s) of the prevailing social and economic institutions and processes. Furthermore, it is apparent that the qualities attached to the young unemployed were used to legitimate austerity measures whose effects are, in fact, harmful for both these young individuals and the wage-earning population as a whole. The archival investigation offers insight into the genealogy of the problematisation of youth in the Irish context, and reveals a strong continuity in the perceived object of measures nominally targeted at ‘youth unemployment’ and those periods wherein it has been constructed as a ‘problem’.
While the research conducted did unearth attempts to contest these policies, they are for the most part weak and partial critiques of the dominant framing of the problem; or in some cases championed the young unemployed at the expense of other more favoured targets for austerity. By accepting the terms of debate in which the focus was on ‘youth’ rather than unemployment part of the equation, many nominally oppositional actors ultimately accepted the contention that it was the qualities of these youths that explained their condition. Alternatively, this study opens a space for a framing in which unemployment and underemployment can be appropriately critiqued as a product of economic and social structures rather than as an individualised failing or a ‘natural’ outcome for marginalised groups.