ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses the relationship between the development of consultative and incorporative policymaking and the evolution of policy responses to new challenges in the fields of higher education, immigration, and the reconciliation of family and working life. It reviews the historical overview of the Republic's policymaking tradition. The literature on higher education policy in Ireland makes the state's commitment to maintaining a 'binary' system, by which is meant an administrative, institutional, and philosophical differentiation between technical and university education. Ireland's economic transformation and especially the tightening labour market gave new life to the traditional concern with ensuring equality of access to higher education. The OECD routinely surveys the higher education systems of its members, but these surveys consistently seem to have made a greater impact on Irish policies than in either the Portuguese or Greek cases. The history of immigration policy in Ireland is a short one, and is clearly overshadowed by the country's history as a nation of migration.
