I want an equal society, not a repeat of Bertie’s politics of the tax break

IN A country of petty injustices, why does nobody in authority mention them?

When so many people are suffering from different inequalities, why has the concept of equality slipped so far down the agenda?

Put it another way. Now that we are, officially, in post-recession Ireland, are jobs and tax the only items allowed on the agenda?

Now, I know I should be euphoric this morning. Brian O’Driscoll’s last home matched marked by a sparkling performance, a good win by Ireland, and the prospect of a nail-biting finish to the Six Nations. I even cut my lawn at the weekend, so good was the weather.

But our current political discourse is so dispiriting that I’m becoming overwhelmed. It’s so limited and self-centred, I wonder if our leaders have learned any lessons from our recent history. For the first time in my life, I’m questioning if there is any real value to politics at all.

The two parties now in government — one of which, Labour, I’ve been a member of all my adult life — appear to agree on one key message. That message is simple. Between now and the election, we’ll ensure that you feel good about recovery by giving you some class of tax break. And that’s only the half of it — wait till you see what we do after you re-elect us.

I’d welcome a tax break as much as anyone, but that’s Bertie politics. Tax breaks have to fit into the scheme of things — but, right now, the promise of tax breaks is the only game in town.

I watched, and then downloaded and read, Enda Kenny’s speech to his ard fheis. None of the things I was looking for were there. So I went back and reread, and downloaded, the speech Eamon Gilmore had earlier given to his party conference. I was much more confident that what I needed to see would be in that speech, so I was even more disappointed by its absence.

Because, as the song says, I still hadn’t found what I was looking for, I went to the speeches delivered by the Taoiseach and Tánaiste at their joint press conference last week, when they launched a progress report called ‘After the Bailout’, about all the progress made since the formation of the Government. I even downloaded the 75-page report.

And nothing.

As hard as I searched all that material, in page after page I could find no mention whatever of any of these concepts: society, community, solidarity, equality, justice. You won’t find any of these words in the speeches of a modern political leader in Ireland — check for yourself if you don’t believe me.

It’s as if all of them, in their substantive senses, have been airbrushed out of political language. The economy, jobs, and the future prospect of tax cuts — they’re the only things that matter.

Everywhere I go, I meet inequality, sometimes to the point of cruelty, sometimes so patently absurd, sometimes so staggeringly obvious that it’s impossible to see how it escapes the attention of the political system (never mind a media that seems just as obsessed with tax cuts as the only barometer of a healthy society).

Let me give you just two small examples.

One of the people I admire most is Paddy Doyle. I’ve written about him before, and you may know his great book, The God Squad, about his years in the Artane boys school. He was sent there at age four and lived through a childhood of abuse — including experimental surgery on his brain. Paddy has generalised dystonia, a neurological condition that may have been exacerbated by the surgery he underwent (without consent) as a child. He lives in a wheelchair, his body in constant spasm, and needs frequent injections into his spine to ease the electric shocks his brain sends to his legs.

Paddy has had a medical card since they were introduced. There are no grounds of income, health, pain or disability on which he could live without one. Even necessary repairs to his electrically operated chair would be impossible without it. But the system has decided, presumably on the basis of some random computer exercise, that he has to satisfy them, after all these years, that he is still entitled to that medical card.

The people reviewing his entitlement have forms to fill and boxes to tick. They’ve never called to meet Paddy, or seen how he lives. Instead, they’re submitting him to bureaucratic torture, with no guarantee, at the end of it, that he will hold onto the lifeline that is his medical card.

Also last week, I participated in the launch of a report into the conditions in which around 30 Irish children live. I visited their accommodation before the launch. It looked, and felt, like a ghetto, bounded by a high, bleak stone wall. The surroundings were damp, dirty and uninhabitable. The mothers who lived there spend their entire lives trying against insurmountable odds to raise children in hygiene and cleanliness. Most had no running water, and sewage frequently backed up into their homes. I’ve never seen anything quite like it in Ireland.

These were traveller children. They live in an official site on the edge of one of Ireland’s proudest and most beautiful cities, Kilkenny. Let me repeat that — it’s an official site, and these are the children of local-authority tenants. They haven’t just pitched up on the roadside. They are children, just like any other children. Two of them sang, beautifully and hauntingly, at the launch of the report, and at least one of the girls is a member of the Irish senior boxing team, alongside Katie Taylor, with high hopes of representing her country in Rio de Janeiro.

These are not children without potential. Far from it. They are children whose lives are being shaped by broken promises, and by a public policy that owes less and less, every day, to notions like solidarity and justice.

These are only two examples — small (and fixable) in their own way. But they’re part of a wider discussion we need to have.

IN HIS speech to the Labour conference, Gilmore described his as the party of fairness. Last time I looked, my party’s core values, which are supposed to guide and shape all its political activities, were freedom, equality, and community.

Even if we all accept that fairness is an adequate substitute for principles like that, what underlying fairness allows a man like Paddy Doyle to be bullied by the system, or children like the ones I met in Kilkenny to be ignored by it?

And what empty political discourse allows a return to entirely material considerations to be the primary measure of social justice?

So, roll on the tax cuts. But maybe, just maybe, we might all be persuaded to wait a bit longer until some of the things that basic decency requires get done first. At least, can we talk about it?