Carefully Capacitating? Rethinking Activation for Lone Mothers in Ireland

This blog post is based on an article published in the Journal of International and Comparative Social Policy by Joe Whelan and Fiona Dukelow.

Ireland’s welfare state is often described as moving towards a more “social investment” model – one that seeks to build people’s skills, strengthen their participation in the labour market, and support longer-term life chances. Activation policies for lone parents have been central to this narrative. They are frequently presented as evidence of a system that is no longer passive but enabling. Yet, when viewed from the perspective of lone mothers themselves, the story is less straightforward. Our recent research explored how these policies are experienced in everyday life, asking a simple but important question: do they actually give lone mothers the capacity to shape their own futures? At the heart of our analysis is the idea of “agentic capacity”. This shifts the focus away from whether people are formally offered choices, and towards whether they can realistically act on them. It draws attention to the conditions – material, institutional, and temporal – that make it possible to balance care, work, and education in sustainable ways.

Lone-parent families occupy a particularly difficult position in contemporary welfare states. They are more likely to experience poverty, including while in employment, and face greater economic vulnerability than two-parent households. In Ireland, these issues have been a longstanding policy concern, motivating reforms designed to increase labour market participation. Over the past decade, these reforms have reshaped income supports and introduced stronger expectations that lone parents engage with employment or training. The Jobseeker’s Transitional Payment (JST), for example, reflects an attempt to combine income support with a more gradual pathway into the labour market. It is framed in supportive, even compassionate, language. But while the language of policy emphasises support and opportunity, lived experience reveals a more complex picture, one shaped as much by constraint as by possibility.

The Childcare Gap

The question of childcare also emerged as fundamental. For many participants in our research, decisions about whether to return to education or take up paid work were not abstract choices grounded in preference or ambition, but practical calculations shaped by cost and availability. When childcare is expensive, limited, or poorly aligned with working hours, it effectively closes down options. Under such conditions, the idea of investing in one’s future can feel distant or even unattainable. What becomes clear is that childcare is not simply one factor among many. It is the infrastructure upon which all other choices depend. Without it, the promise of social investment remains largely rhetorical.

The Invisible Work of Care

At the same time, many of the lone mothers we spoke to were at pains to emphasise the reality of care itself. Parenting alone requires constant attention, emotional labour, and practical effort. Yet this work remains largely invisible within activation systems that prioritise labour market participation above all else. Participants did not reject employment; rather, they struggled with a system that failed to recognise the value of what they were already doing. This tension is particularly evident in expectations around full-time work. Policies often assume that once children reach a certain age, parents should be fully available for employment. But for lone mothers, there is no second adult to share responsibilities or absorb pressures. Caring work continues, and in some cases intensifies, especially as children move into adolescence.

Conditionality and Constraint

Interactions with the welfare system itself also shaped how policies were experienced. Participants described a steady stream of administrative demands – appointments, emails, compliance requirements – that often took little account of their circumstances. For those in education or actively seeking to improve their situation, this could feel not only frustrating but destabilising. Even when doing what policy ostensibly encourages, there was a persistent sense of needing to prove compliance. This created an undercurrent of anxiety. The possibility of sanctions, or the fear of failing to meet requirements, lingered in the background. In this way, policies designed to promote self-improvement could simultaneously make it harder to sustain that progress.

Time, too, played a crucial role. The transition from JST to standard Jobseeker’s Allowance when a child turns 14 emerged as a significant point of concern. Participants described this as a kind of cliff edge, one that loomed well before it was reached. It shaped decisions in the present by narrowing what seemed feasible for the future. Longer-term plans, such as completing education or moving into more secure employment, became riskier in the face of this transition. Instead, there was pressure to move more quickly into work, even if that work was low paid or insecure. What appears as a neat administrative boundary from a policy perspective can feel like a profound disruption from within everyday life.

What Works – and What Doesn’t

And yet, despite these constraints, the research also points to what is possible when conditions align more closely with people’s lives. Where participants had access to sustained support, flexibility, and time, the outcomes were striking. Education opened up new pathways. Work could be organised in ways that were compatible with family life. Futures expanded rather than contracted. These experiences highlight something important: social investment can work. But it works not simply because opportunities are offered, but because they are made practicable. Taken together, the findings suggest that Ireland’s activation system is best understood as a hybrid. It contains elements of a social investment approach, particularly in its emphasis on education and employment. But these are interwoven with features more commonly associated with work-first or coercive models such as conditionality, rigid thresholds, and limited recognition of care. The result is a system that often feels incomplete. The language of investment is present, but the supporting structures are uneven. Lone mothers find themselves navigating a landscape where progress is possible, but frequently fragile.

A more carefully calibrated approach would take seriously the realities of lone parenthood. It would recognise that care, education, and employment are not competing priorities, but interconnected ones. It would align childcare provision with the rhythms of family life, allow for more flexible forms of engagement, and smooth the transitions that currently create insecurity. Perhaps most importantly, it would treat agency not as something individuals either possess or lack, but as something that policy can actively enable or constrain. The question is not whether lone mothers are willing to invest in their futures. The question is whether the system in place allows them to do so on terms that are sustainable, realistic, and fair. Until that gap is addressed, activation will continue to fall short of its promise by appearing capacitating in principle, but being only partially so in practice.

Reference

Whelan, Joe, and Fiona Dukelow. 2026. “Carefully Capacitating? Agentic Capacity and Coercion in the Activation of Lone Mothers in Ireland.” Journal of International and Comparative Social Policy: 1–15. doi: 10.1017/ics.2026.10098.

About the Authors

Joe Whelan is Assistant Professor in Social Studies, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.

Fiona Dukelow is Senior Lecturer in Social Policy, University College Cork, Ireland.