The Haskell way is to carry such things implicitly in a State or Reader monad; since the IORef itself doesn't change, and you need the IO monad around anyway to actually use it, you would use a ReaderT IORef IO and then use ask >>= liftIO . readIORef to get the value and similar to write or modify it. (Commonly one uses a type or newtype+newtype deriving to make one's own monad combining them.)