Social Policy in the Irish Republic

Originally published in 1967, this book examines the health services, social insurance, social assistance, family allowances and housing in the Irish Republic during the late 20th Century. Discussion of the social services is introduced by an outline of the environment in which social policy operates – the political system, social implications of the demographic characteristics and the country’s economy. The book will be of interest to historians of social policy and social work.

Peter R. Kaim-Caudle became a pioneer of systematic Irish social policy studies. For many years Professor of Sociology at Durham University, he worked on secondment with the Economic and Social Research Institute in the 1960s, and was a visiting lecturer at the Institute of Public Administration for more than 20 years. His book Comparative Social Policy and Social Security (1973) made him internationally known and led to him accepting teaching invitations at universities in Taiwan, Australia, Canada, Fiji, Ghana, and Sierra Leone, as well as at University College Cork. After the second World War he became an economics lecturer at Dundee University and moved to Durham University in 1950. There he established the Department of Social Administration and was the first Professor of Social Administration. He was active as a Workers’ Education Association extension lecturer in the Durham mining communities in his early years there. He joined the Labour Party and was a supporter of European integration, which he saw as a way of preventing Europe’s wars.A regular visitor to Ireland, he spent two extended periods here, for nine months in 1963 – 1964 at the Economic Research Institute, as it then was, and as a research professor at the Economic and Social Research Institute, as it became, for three years, 1968 to 1971. His book Social Policy in the Irish Republic (1968) was the first modern study of this subject, and was described in The Irish Times as a "characteristic blend of economic realism and humane concern".