This book on the past one hundred years of the Irish welfare state has laudable ambitions. It offers a broad interpretation and explanation of how Irish welfare provision has evolved since the early twentieth century, focusing on big themes rather than standard narrative. It also forthrightly judges how well the Irish welfare state has performed, measured against standards of justice, equality and decency that the author clearly cares about. There is room for an interpretive work of this kind, given that there is enough narrative literature and analyses of details of the Irish welfare state to justify a fresh overview and to provide the raw material for normative judgement.

However, the effort in that direction provided in this book is not a success. Its passionate commitment to social justice is heartening and its condemnation of Ireland's failures is understandable in that light, but it lacks the foundation in balanced analysis needed to give these features credibility.

The organising idea of the book is that Ireland's revolutionary decade of 1913–23 lost its chance to re-shape society in a progressive direction when a backward-looking nationalism took over and pushed to one side the only positive social forces to have emerged in that period – urban labour and a proto-feminist women's movement. The nationalist take-over acted ‘against the tide of modern history’ to produce a ‘conservative order’ that ‘came to be dominated by a trinity of Church, State and Capital that locked Irish society into a time warp, from which it took many decades to escape’ (p. 64). There are many aspects to this broad thesis that require more elaboration and support than the book provides – such as the notion of a progressive ‘tide of history’ which Ireland in this period can be said to have opted out of. But let us concentrate here on the book's core idea – that a ‘trinity of Church, State and Capital’ emerged from the revolution and for decades afterwards obstructed the growth of public welfare provision that the tide of history might otherwise have produced.

The ‘Capital’ corner of this trinity gets only a sketchy outline which relies on an odd reading of a recent valuable contribution to the literature on Irish social policy, Michelle Norris's Property, Family and the Irish Welfare State (2016) – I should identify myself here as a colleague and occasional co-author with Michelle Norris who agrees with the thrust of her work. Norris points to Ireland's programme of land reform in the first half of the twentieth century and associated developments in social housing, including the early adoption of tenant purchase, as a large state-directed exercise in the downward distribution of wealth. In her view, this exercise amounted to an intriguing alternative model of welfare, even though in the early decades its bias towards the rural population, including the rural poor, caused it to do little for urban areas. While ostensibly lauding Norris’ work, Powell turns her argument on its head and interprets her as saying that the Irish welfare system scarcely developed at all because of its ‘location in asset ownership rather than human need’ (p. 28). He portrays concessions to the ‘conservative economic interests’ represented by rural smallholders and landless labourers as a deplorable step backwards, part of an effort ‘to reverse the European tide of social reform in Ireland’ (p. 66). How the fledgling independent Irish state could have turned its back on the large rural population while achieving social progress or maintaining a stable democracy is among the many questions that his sketchy interpretation of this issue neither asks nor answers.

Where the ‘Capital’ corner of the trinity gets only cursory attention, the ‘Church’ corner gets extended commentary. For the first half of the hundred years the book covers, a central theme is how the Catholic Church blocked anything good that might have emerged in Irish welfare provision. ‘In Ireland’, it says (p. vii), ‘the Great Chain of Being (with the church at the top of the social hierarchy) created a society of moral Lilliputians. . . Church power became the raison d'etat. . . The ideal of the welfare state became almost unmentionable in public discourse’. The book cites some serious scholars of church-state relations (such as John Whyte and Dermot Keogh) to back up its account of Catholic theocracy but does not acknowledge how far removed its interpretation is from theirs. For instance, it might be recalled that, in his classic Church and State in Modern Ireland, John Whyte sought to temper the image of Catholic power by pointing out that of the 1800 or so statutes passed by the Irish government in the first fifty years of independence, he could identify just 16 where the Catholic hierarchy took an interest. One element of the theocratic picture Powell sets out is a portrayal of the 1937 Constitution as a sectarian Catholic document of which Archbishop John Charles McQuaid was a ‘co-maker’ with Éamon de Valera (p. 109). That version is hard to sustain in the light of current historical and legal scholarship, such as that of Dermot Keogh, who showed that McQuaid's role in shaping the Constitution was minimal, and Gerard Hogan's comparative legal analysis of what by European standards of the time were the strong liberal and secular strands in the 1937 Constitution.

The account of the immediate post-war years dwells at length on the over-worked saga of the Mother and Child scheme. It uses that example to back up its claim that the church's denunciation of the ‘servile’ welfare state stifled the upsurge of public welfare provision of the kind then sweeping much of Europe. There is scarcely any mention of major initiatives of the period such as Children's Allowances (1944), the setting up of the Department of Social Welfare (1947), the Social Welfare Act 1952 or the Health Act 1953, all of which the church either supported or took little interest in. The book does not address the challenge of reconciling its story of stasis and Catholic obstruction with the actual historical record of substantial though imperfect advance.

For more recent decades, the analysis hangs on an either-or opposition between economic growth and competitiveness on the one hand versus social justice and redistribution on the other as objectives of state intervention in the economy. It accuses successive Irish governments of plumping for the former at the expense of the latter, causing the Irish welfare state to become a ‘myth’ and a ‘failure’. Chapter 6, ‘Poverty and Social Inequality’, does not marshal the abundant available indicators either to track trends in poverty or inequality over time or to locate Ireland in comparative international context. Included is an assertion that a ‘consistent poverty’ measure adopted for official use in the 1990s had ‘the hallmarks of poverty denial’ and was designed to camouflage the weakness of the state's anti-poverty efforts (pp. 171, 186). No worthwhile analysis of data produced by this measure is presented to support this argument. The book assesses anti-poverty efforts of the 1970s by looking at an action-research programme of local anti-poverty pilot schemes which extended over most of that decade and produced few lasting results (pp. 179–86). Why this small programme is picked out for so much attention is not explained (the account does not mention that total expenditure on it amounted to a mere £2.4 million over the eight years of its existence). Nor is it explained why the ramping up of mainstream social security spending, which was a real centrepiece of the government's welfare efforts in that period, is not mentioned at all. This chapter, then, is central to the entire thrust of the volume but its magpie approach to analysis and evidence undermines its purpose. This approach, sadly, is characteristic of the whole volume.