Gender Trouble in Arcadia or a World of Multigendered Possibility?: Intersubjectivity and Gender in 'The Wind in the Willows'

While Kuznets' and Gaarden's readings offer a valuable entry point for critiquing the role of gender in 'The Wind and the Willows', in this paper I demonstrate an alternative approach using Jessica Benjamin's psychoanalytic feminist theory of intersubjectivity and gender development. First I outline Benjamin's 'postconventional' (1995, p.76) approach to gender, and then follow with an 'intersubjective' reading of 'The Wind in the Willows' that unsettles 'fixed' notions of gender identity, replacing the 'discourse of identity' with the notion of 'plural identifications' (Benjamin 1995, p.75). Integral to this paper is Benjamin's idea that the subject can maintain plural identifications by managing an awareness of both 'sameness' and 'difference' in a intersubjective state of tension, and not as mutually exclusive oppositions conceptualised as 'either/or'

Inequality and the Crisis: The Distributional Impact of Tax Increases and Welfare and Public Sector Pay Cuts

The economic crisis impacts directly on the distribution of income via unemployment and private sector wages, but the way policy responds in seeking to control soaring fiscal deficits is also central to its distributional consequences. Having sketched out the background in terms of inequality trends during Ireland’s boom and the channels through which the recession affects different parts of the income distribution, this paper investigates the distributional impact of the government’s policy response with respect to direct tax, social welfare and public sector pay using the SWITCH tax-benefit model. This provides empirical evidence relevant to future policy choices as efforts to reduce the fiscal deficit continue.

New Brutalist Image 1949–55: 'atlas to a new world' or, 'trying to look at things today'

The seminal exhibition ‘Parallel of Life and Art’ (PLLA) which took place at the ICA in London in 1953 continues to capture the attention of art historians and curators through exhibition histories and curatorial studies. The exhibition is a key element in defining “discourse through images (Bilddiskurs),” a longstanding practice that nonetheless experienced significant change when it encountered the image-making properties of cameras and the means for their dissemination in the press (Flusser). This change coincided with a developing awareness of iconography and the work of the Warburg circle within the Independent Group, that equally understood this form of visual analysis in relation to emerging cybernetic theories of communication and information theory. Building on research undertaken for the Tate Britain display ‘New Brutalist Image 1949-55’ (24 Nov 2014 – 20 Sep 2015), the article argues that PLLA demonstrates how photography was put to work discursively in post-war Britain, deploying new conditions of ‘seeing’ to define a visual order brought about by the transformation of image-capture and mass reproduction technologies, by the new ubiquity of photography, and by the lure of consumer society. Accompanying unprecedented technological possibilities was a new visual sensibility – in other words, a new contemporary aesthetic - rooted in the camera’s lens and mediated through printing processes. Together, this media combination encoded a manner of communication meant to challenge the cultural and social primacy of the printed word, invoking an “Esperanto” of images. Anticipating Lawrence Alloway’s conceptualisation of a ‘fine art pop art continuum’, the article argues, that the photographic image, through its mediating and remediating qualities became a sophisticated, nuanced tool of communication across the practices of art, architecture and design. It also highlights Peter Smithson’s proposition that understanding the visual motivations behind PLLA revealed contemporary cultural conditions “like a Rosetta Stone.” The collaborative team of Alison & Peter Smithson, Nigel Henderson, Eduardo Paolozzi and Ronald Jenkins behind ‘Parallel of Life and Art’ shared an ambition to release the expanded field of everyday day visual culture into vision and experience across the board, displacing the highly invested and ordered culture of art and architecture, one traditionally governed by elitist ideas of public value and taste. The specificity and importance of photography as both a tool of communication and a medium of visual convergence that synthesised disparate registers, has been neglected in studies of British art, leading to misrecognition and an under-conceptualised reading of the exhibitions produced by IG members, including PLLA. As Reyner Banham, the architecture critic and theorist of New Brutalism noted when reviewing PLLA, “We tend to forget that every photograph is an artifact ... the photograph being an artifact applies its own laws of artefaction to the material it documents, and discovers similarities and parallels between the documentation, even where none exists between the objects and events recorded. Thus photographs make us see connections ...” (Reyner Banham, ‘Photography’ [PLLA review], AR, 1953) For the PLLA team of ‘editors’, a body of photographic images taken by Nigel Henderson (who they mutually identified and awarded the role of photographer to act as their translator, mediator and ‘image-finder’) nonetheless reflects the experiments of the group, documenting their work and recording their visual sensibility. Through our selection and curation of images, the article will demonstrate how photography was exploited as a medium to bring disparate practices, spatial and temporal environments, social and cultural spaces together in the binding matrix of the photographic image

TAX REFORM: SELECTED ISSUES. ESRI RESEARCH SERIES NUMBER 12 OCTOBER 2009

The report of the Commission on Taxation (2009) documents an agenda for the reform of taxation at a time when the public finances are under very severe pressure. It would undoubtedly be easier to reform taxation at a time when the overall tax take could be reduced, rather than when gains and losses must balance out in a revenue-neutral fashion. It is still more difficult if reforms have to be introduced at a time when, for macroeconomic reasons, the overall tax take must rise.1 But even when facing the task of increasing revenues, there are choices to be made between increasing rates on the existing base, and broadening the base, without an increase in rates. As Poterba (2009) stated in this year’s Geary Lecture, a touchstone result in public finance is that …the distortionary cost of a tax system depends not on the level of tax rates but on the square of tax rates.2 This makes a strong argument for base-broadening rather than rate increases, which informs much of the report of the Commission on Taxation

BUDGET PERSPECTIVES 2019, PAPER 1. LONE-PARENT INCOMES AND WORK INCENTIVES. July 2018

This paper examines how changes to the social welfare system for lone parents, such as the tightening of eligibility criteria for One-Parent Family Payment and the introduction of Jobseeker’s Transitional Payment, affected lone-parent incomes and work incentives. Our main contributions are threefold: we examine the cumulative effect of policy changes on the income of lone parents, and how changes to lone-parent-specific schemes affected income and work incentives, and quantify the extent to which childcare costs act as a labour market barrier for lone parents. Firstly, policy changes do not occur in a vacuum, therefore we assess how all policy from 2011 to 2018 affected lone-parent income. We find that changes to social welfare policy for lone parents resulted in income losses for employed lone parents, but had little effect on non-employed lone parents. All other changes over the period decreased the income of both employed and non-employed lone parents. We examine how these social welfare changes affected the work incentives. The reforms resulted in more lone parents having a greater financial incentive to be out of work, thus weakening the financial incentive to be in work. Finally, informed by an abundant literature regarding childcare costs as an obstacle to female labour supply, we highlight the impact of these costs on the incentive to be in work. We find that on accounting for childcare costs, being out of work becomes much more financially attractive for many lone parents. The availability of subsidies on childcare costs helps to reduce this disincentive, but even so, childcare costs represent a substantial barrier to lone-parent labour market participation

Pension Policy: New Evidence on Key Issues. ESRI RESEARCH SERIES NUMBER 14 NOVEMBER 2009

Pension systems world-wide face major long-term challenges in providing adequate incomes in retirement to an ageing population. Ireland is no exception. While at present there are more than five people of working age for each person of pension age, by 2061, assuming pension age is unchanged, there would be no more than two. Defined benefit (DB) schemes have come under particular pressure, and a shift from defined benefit to defined contribution (DC) schemes has been evident in Ireland as in other countries. In part, this reflects the fact that DB schemes tend to place the risk arising from increased longevity on the scheme funder, whereas DC schemes limit the liability of the funder but put a greater risk on the pension-holder. The government’s Green Paper on Pensions explored how the Irish pensions system might best be reformed to address the challenges of providing adequate pensions at an affordable cost in the context of increased longevity. In doing so, it raised a number of key questions for consideration. This study is designed to provide new evidence on some of these questions, relating mainly to the structuring of tax incentives to encourage improved coverage of private pensions. Earlier this year the government introduced a “Pension-related Deduction” – more commonly called the public service pension levy. We examine the nature of this policy instrument, and how it is to be interpreted