Wealthy Ireland has cast aside values, campaigner says

IRELAND’S growing affluence has numbed and dulled society’s vision of the common good, a campaigner for the homeless warned yesterday.

Sister Stanislaus Kennedy said wealth has brought many good things to the country with new industries, houses, cars and roads sprouting up amid growing hopes and confidence.

But the founder of Focus Ireland, the organisation for the homeless, said the downside could be seen in soaring property prices, rip-off retailers, spiralling personal debts and huge pressure on people to keep up.

She said issues afflicting the country included “pressure and problems with childcare, long commutes, two-job families, lack of quality time, new forms of inequality, exclusion and marginalisation”.

“Unfortunately, we have seen affluence as an end in itself, not as a means to an end, and it has numbed and dulled our vision of the common good,” she said.

“It has numbed our concern for each other and dulled our ability to see luxuries as luxuries. So the second house and the faster car and the second holiday, and the third bathroom, at any cost, are the new badges of progress, which are necessary to quench a thirst that wasn’t there 20 years ago.”

Sr Kennedy told the Magill Summer School in Donegal the Government has abandoned its historic commitment to providing housing for those who cannot buy their own during its most wealthy time.

“Households on waiting lists have more than doubled from 19,376 in 1989, to 43,684 in 2005. Social housing is not welcomed in many areas. Developers don’t want social housing, neither do local residents,” she said.

“A humane society is one that distributes the goods of society in a way that gives fair access to health, education, housing and transport.”