ABSTRACT
In Ireland, the terms social economy and social enterprises have become part of policy and academic discourse only since the mid 1990s. This can be attributed primarily to the attention given to these concepts in the European Union in recent years and particularly to the identification of the social economy as a potential source of employment in EU documents.1 The social economy – and social enterprises as used in this context – is thought of as a distinct sector, neither public nor private, which is generally involved in service provision, most usually in situations of market failure. In one of the first references to the sector in Irish policy discourse, the National Economic and Social Forum (NESF)2
identified the social economy as ‘concerned with meeting real demands which cannot be fully met by the market alone and are not provided by the public sector. It represents a continuum of delivery possibilities between fully commercial and public provision’ (NESF 1995: 19).
