Social Inclusion and the Limits of Pragmatic Liberalism: The Irish Case

Since the 1990s, Irish public policy has been framed by a concern with social inclusion. While the idea of social inclusion has considerable potential from the point of view of social justice, critical engagement with the concept reveals it to mask and justify more regressive political agendas. This paper maps the competing models of inclusion operational in Irish social policy, and reconceptualises them in terms of a ‘narrow’ version of inclusion, which reproduces the status quo through a process of including into existing structures, and a ‘broad’ version of inclusion, which refers to a vision of a constitutively inclusive society. Drawing on the normative political theory reflected in the different conceptions of social inclusion, this paper asks whether is possible to use the idea of social inclusion to produce a constitutively inclusive society. It concludes that this is possible, though likely to be difficult to achieve in the current political climate.