So the UK had two main planks to its policy response. Rod, can you talk us through what the UK did, first of all? So let’s look at the initial policy responses. And so we were very much capturing a moving picture as was the world at the time, because nobody knew quite when things were going to start and stop.Ībsolutely. So we were able to kind of, kind of capture almost a year really, in terms of their responses. So we ended up luckily, I think, for the work that we did being able to observe some of the ongoing responses as the second wave emerged. And I think we thought we might stop it in the end of the first wave. Well, to be honest, it was it was a moving clock in that we started this research very much at the start, you know around May where we had a chance to look at what had happened since March 2020. So it was an interesting case in that sense as well.Īnd what time period did your research look at? And again, why? And that, that meant for an interesting, almost natural experiment, in terms of how the configuration of income support sort of enabled the responses or configured to the responses that happened.
But it also gives a very interesting opportunity to look at path dependency in action, if you like in that we did, although they’re similar, we started the pandemic with quite different basic welfare systems in the capacity of the two countries to respond. And the, the similar kind of liberal structure of the two welfare states. Well, I suppose there’s a logic for comparing the UK and Ireland in terms of the historical connections between the two welfare states. But I think that lends itself to, I guess, the comparison that we made in the paper between the UK and Ireland.Īnd Mary so as Rod has, has said there the work that you’ve done, compared to the UK and Ireland, why was that? But it’s also relevant, I think, because Brexit as a period was one where the relationship between the UK and Ireland was very much brought to the fore, not an easy aspect of those negotiations. So the attention of policymakers was very much on Brexit in the lead up to those initial cases. So as we note in the paper, the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in the UK, came on the very day that the UK was, was leaving the European Union. It was significant in the first instance, because minds were focused elsewhere. I began by asking Rod about the policy landscape pre-COVID-19 and why that was significant. Rod Hick from the University of Cardiff, and Professor Mary Murphy from the National University of Ireland Maynooth. I’m Catherine McDonald and today we’re comparing the social policy responses of the UK and Ireland to the pandemic. Hello, and welcome to Generation Pandemic, a podcast from the Interdisciplinary Child Wellbeing Network, looking at the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on children in the UK and Ireland.
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