Neoliberal Urban Policy and Challenging the Ideological Straightjacket

Abstract

Since the economic crash, the particular pathway and series of measures adopted by successive governments in Ireland have amounted to a comprehensive structural adjustment programme (Fraser et al., 2013). The socialisation of private debt, a process mobilised with the introduction by the government of a sweeping bank guarantee in 2008 and formalised via the terms and conditions of the EU, ECB, IMF (the ‘troika’) bailout from late 2010, set the material agenda within which policy measures would be implemented. Essentially, private banking debt, the financial and property bubbles were to be paid for through austerity, the privatisation of state assets and a series of wide-ranging labour ‘reforms’.