Indeed, in Ireland, despite the substantial loss of national income in the bust, policy has gone some way towards limiting the rise in poverty in the downturn (Callan et al., 2013). This surely reflects a broad political consensus in Ireland; indeed some will argue that more should have been done.
Actually the data suggest that the later years of the boom did allow relative poverty to decline in Ireland, at a time when the opposite was happening in many countries (Figure 8). And the corresponding data for 2010 and 2011 suggest that any reversal in this improvement has been small and mainly concentrated among young adults (the data for 2012 are not yet available).