Spatial Justice and the Irish Crisis is an important collection of geographical essays which provides a coherent and sustained critique of the 2008 crisis and its impacts on Ireland. Building on research projects by its main contributors, the volume aims at identifying the injustices found in the underlying spatial structure of Irish social life. The collection also opens a debate on the application and use of the phrase ‘spatial justice’, offering throughout reflections on its merits, potential and applications. In addition to work produced by geographers based in Ireland, the book includes essays by Danny Dorling and John Agnew, as well as a highly engaging interview with David Harvey conducted by John Morrissey at the University of Galway. While these particular pieces only make passing reference to Ireland, they enrich the collection by juxtaposing the experience of the 2008 crash with international events, expand the scales at which the crisis must necessarily be comprehended, and act as an important antidote to the ‘exceptionalising’ characteristics of some Irish cultural and social sciences studies.

The 2008 crash in Ireland is firmly lodged in public memory despite the efforts invested in manufacturing its disappearance. For the Irish establishment, the Crash and the Crisis that followed are ‘the new normal’ to be solved by seeing through austerity policies and gunning for growth. The return to growth of Ireland in 2013 (+3.4% GNP growth) followed by a growth rate of over 5 per cent since 2014 indicates that as long as consideration of the national debt is elided, Ireland seems from one vantage point to be on track for financial stability. This situation seems to confirm a predication made by the Irish Minister of Finance on St Patrick’s Day 2012, when at a ceremony at the Paris Bourse he declared that Irish economy would soon recover and ‘go like a rocket’. Yet, as the essays in Spatial Justice and Irish Crisis make plain, economic growth alone will not melt this crisis away. While some parts of the economy are growing, the social and spatial impacts of the crash and austerity are woven through the fabric of Irish society. The crisis has left a scar on the landscape, psyche and social life of the country. It is an interruption that has buckled the myths of modernization which shaped Ireland since the 1960s and rattled the polity. Its negative legacies may take generations to dissipate.

Spatial Justice and the Irish Crisis shows how deeply the crisis is entangled with spatial imaginaries and place-based materialities across Ireland. These include thousands of abandoned or incomplete housing estates, dramatic increases in homelessness, cuts in community development, the collapse of social housing provision, the return of very high youth unemployment and emigration, rapid rent rises, the decline of rural towns, and more recently, the roll out of mortgage foreclosures and repossessions of family homes. Around 400,000 people, which is about 19 percent of the active population, have emigrated since Ireland’s financial crisis began in 2008, with most travelling to the UK, Australia and Canada. These kinds of unsettling issues present a crisis that is clearly segmented socially and spatially and worsened existing levels of inequality.

In the introduction to the volume Gerry Kearns outlines the depth of the problem. His message is stark. Ireland has the fifth highest public debt to GDP ratio in the world. The state has borrowed 85 billion from the IMF and the European Central Bank to bail out it banking system. All of that private banking debt has been passed on to the Irish public. A fifth of all households are jobless. A quarter of the population can be classified as deprived. An eighth of all mortgage holders are in arrears of more than 90 days. There is no sign of the Minister’s rocket here. The introduction also supplies a compact and critical review of the Irish research that addresses the crisis and speaks to questions of social justice. For readers interested in gaining a foothold in recent geographical work on Ireland, this introduction is an excellent point of departure and complements several other recent texts on the crisis published by geographers in Ireland (Crowley and Linehan, 2013; Mercille and Murphy, 2015). Across a range of interventions, Kearns demonstrates the impacts and consequences of crisis and austerity on finance, the built environment, inequality and identity. He offers a perceptive critique of both the neo-liberal model that facilitated the crash and its consequences. He echoes concerns raised more broadly about the need to ensure that the current fiscal catastrophe does not lay the foundation for a future and more entrenched social crisis. Kearns also outlines a loose framework for considering for spatial justice.Here he draws on Ed Soja and Henri Lefebvre and focuses upon issues related to spatial, environmental and place justice. But the principal work in this regard is editorial, as each contributor, to varying degrees of success, addresses the question of spatial justice in their own terms.

The collection opens with two essays by John Agnew and Danny Dorling. Agnew’s evaluation of the relationships between reconfiguration of politics and space as consequences of the increasing power of finance capital is instructive. His observations about the dilution of sovereignty, the decomposition of territory, and the borderless nature of the state anticipate the rollout of these processes in Ireland where the IMF slipped through Dublin with the diamond hard look of a cobra and laid down the austerity rule book. Dorling’s essay - which originates as a public lecture at the RIA in Dublin in 2013 - is a triumph and a model of outstanding geographical writing. He ranges fluently through the political economy of contemporary housing in the UK, and is at turns bitingly insightful, funny and critical.

Three essays on the intersection of crisis with housing, planning and environment in Ireland come next. Rory Hearne, Cian O’ Callaghan and Rob Kitchin discuss the housing crisis. They address issues in social housing, problems with urban regeneration, the phenomenon of the so called ‘Ghost Estates’ (abandoned or incomplete housing stock), and geography of negative equity. The last is mapped in Ireland and in Dublin. Never was a colour map so devastating and depressing as this one, when one considers the implications this has for the individuals and families impacted by overbearing personal debt. Given the obvious talents of each of these authors, the book might have benefited from hearing more from them. I would recommend readers follow up on their work on the crisis, not least Hearne’s brilliant book on urban regeneration in Dublin, Public Private Partnerships in Ireland (2011).

Hearne’s chapter is followed by an investigation into the regulations and politics governing planning gain by Marie Mahon. She analyzes how attempts to mobilize development charges for the public good and regulate affordable housing were unraveled during the boom and almost obliterated during the crash when property developers went to wall. Mahon demonstrates that these principles have been subsequently diluted in the post-crash period, when any prospect of using planning as means to foster redistribution has been frozen out by the singular focus on economic recovery, enterprise and competitiveness.

Following on, Anna Davies contributes a chapter on issues in the green economy. She looks principally at ‘cleantech clusters’ – a network of both large and medium sizes companies and public and voluntary organizations engaged in developing green enterprises and activities. The dead hand on progressive social and environmental innovation, which is so characteristic of every political regime deploying austerity, floats in the background of this chapter. But what is interesting about this essay is the way in which Davies is able to identify hope amongst the organizations attempting to mobilize co-operative interactions and innovation in spite of the mainly aspirational nature of government policy on sustainability (interestingly, Davies offers the only chapter in the book where we ‘hear’ the voices of research participants, a curious lacuna given the collection is intended to showcase work in contemporary social geography). Davies is less sure, however, about how and if these environmental actions will address inequality. Based on the current trajectory of Irish politics and society, which has cultivated its own species of neoliberalism, it is likely that deprived families will be further excluded by both environmental regulation and scarcity of key resources in the future. Certainly the mass marches and intense resistance in working class communities to the imposition of new taxes on domestic water consumption bears that out.

The next bundle of chapters address broadly the question of opportunity. In an essay on Limerick City in the west of Ireland, Des McCafferty and Eileen Humphreys report on a detailed study of children’s well-being in urban areas affected by a flag-ship regeneration project. Initially conceived as large billion euro public-private partnership, the Limerick Regeneration Framework Implementation Plan has been considerably scaled down following the crash. By mobilizing issues around environmental justice, McCafferty and Humphrey advocate for more attention to be placed on children and public space. They demonstrate the poor outcomes for children in the most deprived urban areas, a scenario they conclude is exacerbated by the entrenched levels of polarization and segregation operating in housing and labour markets. David Meredith and Jon Paul Faulkner provide a useful overview of regional development using labour market data. Readers new to Ireland will thank them for the historical context in which they plot out the progressive integration of the Irish economy into the European Union. This chapter undertakes an elaborate shift-share analysis of employment statistics to represent long-term trends in the structure of regional employment. Noting – but not actually commenting in depth upon the question of scale –, this analysis claims to track the flow of capital into the regions of Ireland, principally facilitated through jobs in construction linked to investment infrastructure and tax-incentives for new property development. Questions around the spatial injustice of well-being is the focus of the chapter supplied by Ronan Foley and Adrian Kavanagh. The two authors deploy a quantitative methodology to create a new index of well-being to calculate and map geographies of health in the context of spatial justice. They argue that mapping spatial injustice can be used to support community development. In both these essays I found the occupation and level of critical intention of statistical reasoning interesting. It is important to note that during the boom demographic data and statistical discourses were deployed in various arenas to justify property-price increases, predict future economic growth, zone land and expand property based tax incentives. In light of these modes of enquiry and their political histories in contemporary Ireland, to different degrees, both of these essays could have benefited from further reflections clarifying the difference between the social geographies of calculation, critical cartography and merely maps that show the uneven distribution of things.

The penultimate section of the book addresses the theme of identity. Of all the chapters in this collection Mary Gilmartin offers the most sophisticated treatment of spatial justice. She focuses upon procedural and distributional justice as a means to interpret the social geographies of contemporary immigration into Ireland. She effortlessly threads the consequence of spatial injustice relationally though EU and Irish policies and draws these concerns through her data in a way that clearly describes the pattern of immigration to the country. Throughout she maintains a critical take on the experience of immigrant communities, not least of which is the social exclusion of Eastern European immigrants and their clustering in lower paid and more precarious employment. In their collaboration Gerry Kearns and David Meridith offer a very comprehensive overview of the debates concerning plans to secularize schools. As much as the 2015 Irish constitutional change legalizing gay marriage indicates that Irish society is increasingly liberal, the control of primary schools is still dominated by the Roman Catholic Church. Kearns and Meredith argue that this situation is exclusionary and increasingly non-representative of Irish society. They conclude, however, that under conditions of austerity there is little prospect of creating greater equity in education. Yet, they persist in pressing for its consideration, as a means to advocate for the rights of children and parents to a secular education.

With only a couple of exceptions, the essays are crisply written and amply illustrated with colour maps. Overall, they are effectively linked to each other, making the book a readable whole. The volume was published under the auspices of Royal Irish Academy and one of its intentions is to contribute to a debate in Ireland about broadening the pool of thinkers shaping national debates and policy. Whilst some international readers may pick up on the academic affordances implied in this objective, this does not distract from the collection’s success in providing rapid access to several aspects of the crisis in areas concerned with planning, immigration, housing, education, employment, health and urban regeneration. 

References

Crowley C and D Linehan (2013) Spacing Ireland: Place, Society and Culture in a Post-Boom Era. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Hearne R (2011) Public Private Partnerships in Ireland: Failed Experiment or the Way Forward for the State? Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Mercille J and E Murphy (2015) Deepening Neoliberalism, Austerity, and Crisis: Europe’s Treasure Ireland. London: Palgrave Macmillan.