The small community of social policy academics and researchers in the Republic of Ireland has long complained of the relative neglect of Ireland in much of the international academic literature and yearned for more detailed accounts of Irish social policy – especially for undergraduate teaching. This comprehensive text aspires to fill that gap, and in many ways it does so.

Part one, comprising three chapters, gives a historical overview of social policy in Ireland from the seventeenth century to the present day, and part two reviews key concepts, politics and ideology. The most substantial parts are three and four. Part three contains an analysis of the main functional areas of policy – social security, health, education and housing – and part four reviews policy in relation to social groups and quality of life issues. In part three, the chapters are written within a framework that is sufficiently standardised to give continuity between policy areas and yet is sufficiently flexible to accommodate the topics that are unique to each policy area. Each of these chapters gives a brief description of current provisions, a review of historical developments and an analysis of recent policy. Part four focuses on social groups and analyses how social policy in Ireland addresses issues of diversity and social exclusion as they affect certain vulnerable groups such as migrants, travellers, children and the disabled. Finally, in keeping with the admirably broad definition of social policy set out in the introduction, the text ends with a careful exposition of how environmental concerns are critical to social policy.

Throughout the text important concepts are highlighted, policy landmarks such as key documents and legislation are reviewed and supplementary readings and questions for discussion are given at the end of each chapter. There is also a good index. The strengths of the book are its sheer breadth and the manner in which it attempts to link the detail of social policy in Ireland to wider theories and debates. In particular, part 2 acts as an analytical bridge between the historical detail of welfare state development and the analysis of policies in part three. The importance of part 2 lies in the way the authors bring out the hybrid, contradictory nature of the Irish welfare state. On the one hand, they review theoretical and ideological stances in social policy (Marxism, liberalism, feminism and so on); on the other, their account of Irish politics brings out the non-ideological, consensual nature of Irish welfare politics. Similarly, they locate Ireland in the ‘worlds of welfare’ and show how its welfare state has a mixture of traits – liberal as well as corporatist – that defy easy summary.

There are two limitations to this otherwise commendable text. First, the impressive detail in the policy chapters tends to obscure the key analytical points somewhat. For example, the chapter on health policy introduces the standard distinction between tax-funding, social insurance and private insurance models in health provision. The point here is that Ireland's health funding model is mixed, comprising semi-comprehensive public provision supplemented by increasingly pervasive private insurance, and many of the social policy problems in health care originate with this model. Instead of consistently anchoring the analysis of health care to this model and offering a concise critique of selected aspects of health policy, the chapter covers a range of topics: primary care, organisational reform, health inequalities, amongst others. Similarly, in the case of housing some of the detail could have been sacrificed in favour of a more selective analysis of how owner-occupation drives public and policy discourse in housing. To be fair to the authors, achieving the balance between the general and the particular was always going to be difficult. The authors may have erred on the side of detail and much of the detail may become dated rather quickly.

Second, the undergraduate reader will be left unaware of the rich and controversial theoretical literature (mostly comparative) on welfare state change and retrenchment; this literature includes work by Castles, Pierson, Bonoli, Clasen and many others and is concerned to examine the sources and effects of contemporary welfare state trends. Is the welfare state changing? Does the concept of retrenchment adequately capture recent trends? Are all welfare states subject to similar pressures, and, if so, is there variation in states’ responses to the pressures? This body of recent work (admittedly, not easy to summarise for first or second year undergraduates) is directly relevant to Ireland and a greater use of it could have enriched the analytical framework in part 2.

The authors have done students of Irish social policy – those in Ireland as well as those outside – a service. They have composed a comprehensive, balanced and well-organised text that will earn it an enduring place in academic work on Irish social policy.