There’s one group of citizens who are determined to find a better way
The decisions made over the past two years, and those about to happen, represent a kind of mortgage that this generation and the next one will have to pay.
The rumours, if that’s what they are, that the bulk of the Government’s ‘efforts’ are going to be in the spending area are genuinely frightening.
The Minister for Health and Children, Mary Harney, appears to be making a virtue, for instance, of going around the place announcing that she is set to take a full €1 billion out of the non-pay element of the HSE’s budget.
That isn’t possible to do without causing immense pain and suffering to people who simply can’t afford to take any more. Cuts of that kind are socially irresponsible.
But we are in thrall, it seems, to the financial markets. We spent years trying to attract them to bestow their largess on Ireland – not by telling them what a civilised country we were, but by trying to cajole them into believing that this was a really good place to make a fast buck.
Countries like Sweden have always attracted investment, and have always been able to service their loans, but they never had to sell their souls to do it.
We, on the other hand, tried to turn bits of Ireland into semi-respectable tax havens, and we told those with money to invest they wouldn’t have to worry about too much regulation here. Year after year the Government piled on the tax breaks – no matter what pile of bricks and mortar the rich wanted to invest in, the Government ensured there would be a healthy tax-free return on it.
Money flooded in, of course. Why wouldn’t it – there was a killing to be made in Ireland.
And suddenly, when the bubble burst, the same financial markets that poured money into Ireland were the first to realise the game was up.
The only way to make a killing now is to charge Ireland extortionate interest rates. And of course to demand that Ireland mortgage its future and the future of its children. And we’re happy to do so, it seems.
That’s why all the news headlines are the same.
When I sat down to write this piece I went on the RTÉ news website and grabbed the first few headlines I saw there. They’re described on the website as “connected stories” and cover the last day or so. But in sequence as they appeared, this was their message.
“Welfare faces significant cutbacks – O Cuív.”
“Cowen says choices facing the country ‘stark’”.
“Government raises four-year target to €15bn.”
“Growth forecast for Ireland to be downgraded.”
“Government aims to ‘strike a balance’ in budget.” (Between spending cuts and tax increases, that is).
In short, they tried to sell our future to the highest bidder. And when that didn’t work any more, they decided to mortgage our future instead.
Well, there’s one group of people in Ireland who reckon we can’t allow that to happen. Right now, they’re 1,000-strong. But that number, I reckon, has the potential to grow many times over. Claiming our Future, it’s called. And that’s exactly what this group of people is determined to start doing.
1,000 people – for the most part, ordinary, card-carrying citizens of Ireland. That’s the number who gathered in the RDS in Dublin last Saturday. Not to protest or to march or to burn anything down. Although to be honest, that’s what a lot of us felt like doing.
But as one person there told me, “I’m here because if I wasn’t here, I’d be in the pub giving out about the bloody system. I could be angry, frustrated, bitter – I could even be in despair. And to be honest, that’s the way I feel a lot of the time. But when I heard about this, I decided to park all those feelings and get involved. If we don’t start to change the rotten values that are at the heart of our despair, no one else will”.
1,000 people. No leaders (just some brilliant organisers). Every voice was equally valuable on the day and equally recognised. As we worked through the outline of a policy and values agenda in groups of 10, scattered around the vast hall of the RDS, the palpable sense grew that something real and tangible could come out of this.
It will take time. The things we were asked to debate and discuss concerned the medium-term.
Claiming our Future is not a political party – instead it has grown organically from a series of smaller meetings to the point where it could become a movement for a more progressive vision of what Ireland can be.
If you look at the website of the movement, you’ll see their core analysis is that Irish society is subject to a wide range of “global, regional and national forces for change. These are not just economic but also include demographic, technological, and environmental forces”.
The organisers of the movement go on to say that “Ireland can only negotiate a way through these forces for change on the basis of a clear set of values that inform the type of society we want to be. We believe that values such as those of equality, inclusion, sustainability and human dignity offer a necessary compass for Ireland’s future and suggest very different approaches to addressing and managing these forces for change”.
They were the values we discussed on Saturday. The real job, of course, is to put flesh on the bones of values and turn them into policies, and move on from that to develop the kind of campaign that can help to put those policies into action.
AS I understand it, the movement doesn’t want to be a political one. In that case, it is going to have to develop a campaign that can shape and influence the agenda of politics.
I’m guessing that what the Claiming our Future movement is saying is that it’s not enough to change the Government – we have to change the values that inform the new government. It’s not enough to demand a new economic direction – we have to set out clear priorities for that direction.
So, it’s probably too much to expect that Claiming our Future will, over the next week or so, burst on to the political stage. It’s going to take a bit of doing to analyse the hopes and aspirations of 1,000 people and turn them into a coherent set of directions. But 1,000 people parked their frustrations and their bitterness and cynicism at the door of the RDS last Saturday, and set about doing a day’s work to begin to articulate a demand for change. Some were older, some younger. Some had been down this road before, others were impatient for immediate change.
The thing that motivated them all was that they cared enough about the future of their country to get stuck in, and you can see the results of their discussions on www.claimingourfuture.ie. It’s a website worth watching, by the way. Pretty soon, 1,000 could become 10,000, then maybe 100,000. When that happens, a new movement of citizens could really be shaping the future.
