Irish Social Catholicism and the Development of the Living Wage Doctrine

Abstract

This article traces the development of the living wage concept in the social thought of Irish Catholic intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Revs. John A. Ryan and Walter McDonald, and Edward Phelan, who helped establish the International Labour Organization. The debates in which these thinkers engaged highlight the importance of gendered understandings of work and the significance of the family unit in the development of a moral critique of the capitalist system. This led to their differing views on the role to be played by the state in regulating the economy, and revealed how inseparable religion and economics were in their social thought. Social Catholicism played an important role in framing social policy in Ireland after independence; through the living wage doctrine, it played a significant part in a wider transatlantic debate about the moral questions posed by capitalism, in ways that continue to reverberate today.