We need to end entitlements and introduce fairness into society

NOW that the referendum is over, can we get back to talking about some of the forgotten words?

Thanks to the crisis and the endless debates we’re all experts in a range of new terms. We’ve even been bombarded, until we’re almost senseless, with acronyms. Hands up anyone who doesn’t know what the letters ESM stand for, for instance. Yes, that’s right, an awful lot of us know it means European Stability Mechanism. Not a lot of people knew that a month or so ago.

Banking. Stability. Certainty. Structural deficit. The markets. Growth. Spain, Greece, Portugal. We’ve talked about nothing else for the last month, and we’re all experts in both our own national finances and the finances of half the countries of Europe.

And all sorts of people have become household names, as if we know them intimately. We all refer to the Chancellor of Germany by her first name — Angela is bandied about as often as Enda. We followed the plummeting fortunes of President Sarkozy, and we live in hope for Francoise Hollande.

And, of course, Austerity. Austerity has made our heads spin over the last month. Vote yes for Austerity, vote no for Austerity. Austerity will never end. Austerity is the root of all evil. Austerity is necessary for recovery. Austerity will kill us all. Austerity is good for you.

Well, we’ve decided all that now, haven’t we. We’ve decided that austerity is unavoidable for a while yet. The banks, the economy, the public finances — they have to recover before the rest of us can recover.

In the end, most of us voted yes because we came to believe there would be consequences for voting no, and they’d be bad. As someone on Twitter said after the referendum, we didn’t vote, we shrugged. With a sort of resignation. And all we know for sure as a result is that if we need to go to the official bank looking for another dig-out — if we can’t reassert our independence by borrowing from all the banks on the open market — at least there won’t be a sign on the door saying “No Irish need apply”. That’s something, I guess.

And we had to do it. I said a couple of weeks ago here that a majority of us would vote yes, and that we might do it with a heavy heart. Because the truth is that our economy is just as fragile today as it was the day before we voted.

But look, it’s over. We’ve taken the plunge. We’ve all learned a lot. So would you mind if I tried to I re-introduce a couple of other words into the discussion? Words like Equal? Or Fair? Or even Just? They’re the forgotten words. Over the last month or so, even the most ardent left-wingers in the debate felt they had to discuss everything in terms of their banking knowledge and display a better grasp of international finance then those on the right. And the word that slipped into complete oblivion in the course of this entire debate was the word Society.

And that matters — a lot — because it’s not only our economy that’s fragile. We’re going to have to wake up pretty soon to the fact that we are living in an increasingly fragile society. In all the referendum excitement (if excitement isn’t too strong a term) we have forgotten completely that this is a country made up of people. People who live in fear, and hope, and despair. I don’t know if all those people are one day going to take to the streets, as they have in other countries. It will happen if the anger becomes stronger than the despair.

It used to be the case that you could characterise the people who were struggling, that you could put them into groups. You knew where they lived — in communities where disadvantage was endemic and multi-generational. But now, it’s increasingly difficult. There were thousands of families in Ireland only a few short years ago whose main challenge was to find decent and affordable childcare so they could keep both careers going. Now many of those same families are struggling with one bread-winner, or maybe none. The two holidays a year have been replaced by a moment of dread every time the mortgage payment is due.

Side by side with this “new” poverty, what you might call the “old” poverty has got deeper. We are a country with hungry children and with high rates of absenteeism from primary school. We are a country where the provision of decent services for elderly people is governed by a financial cap each year. We are a country where people who spend their whole lives coping with disability in their families are now being charged for a week or two of respite care for their loved ones.

This isn’t new, of course, although it has got worse for some. What is new is that we’ve stopped talking about it. Every week I get invitations to events designed to highlight one injustice or another, or to address some pressing social issue. I would love to be able to attend far more of them than I can, and I have a feeling that if more people did, anger would really begin to boil over.

We can fix the banks, but we seem unable to address increasing suicide rates. We can put the euro on a sounder footing, but we’re lost in the face of a growing literacy problem. We can concentrate on stability in the public finances till we’re blue in the face, but we can do nothing for people condemned to live in estates where the promise of regeneration disappeared with the last swish of the tail of the Celtic Tiger.

Of course I’m not arguing that we can magically and instantly produce the resources to fix all these problems. But where’s the imagination to give us a real sense of priorities? Why can’t we at least discuss these things? I remember reading somewhere that there could be nobility in austerity. If austerity meant a real sense of shared sacrifice, with those more vulnerable being protected, it would surely have more meaning, wouldn’t it? If it meant that really powerful vested interests — the professions, the upper echelons of the public service, the politically comfortable and “entitled” — were told that they had to yield to the interests of the whole people, wouldn’t there be a sense in which we were using austerity to build something fairer and more modest?

Instead, the way we apply austerity is by cutting services to those whose protests won’t amount to more than a whimper, and by applying bureaucratic techniques to the delivery of what’s left. We say no to those without a voice, and we whisper yes to those with power and influence. Despite everything, we’ve managed to preserve entitlement for some.

So if we can’t end austerity, let’s put it to work instead, in ending entitlement and in ensuring fairer and more equal shares of a humbler cake. We’ve done what we can for the fragile economy. We must start concentrating, before it’s too late, on our fragile society. At least let’s start talking about it.