Austerity for All Seasons: Communicating on the Economy in Ireland

What is clear is that in Ireland it has been a good crisis for economists, in the sense that the status and power of the profession has increased, especially in public discourse and state bureaucracy. This is not to deny that the academic critique and public questioning of the status of economics, that has followed the failure of the profession internationally prior to the crisis. It would be interesting to see if the rise of economists status has taken place in other countries and if there is a pattern to the profession’s fortunes in its different fields across, for example core and peripheral countries, with some studies already providing some insights (FitzGerald & O’Rourke, 2018; Maesse, 2017). Of course not all economists are neoliberals, and distinguishing between different types of economists and their influence is important (Plehwe, Neujeffski & Krämer, 2018). Furthermore, as Rieder and Theine (2019) show the media does not treat all economists equally, and we need to better understand how such interactions in the media work to legitimate economic expertise (FitzGerald & O’Rourke, 2016).