From elderly artists to lone parents, everyone deserves a basic livelihood

How do you know when they’re deserving? When they’re miserable, that’s how, writes Victoria White.

MY NORTHERN Presbyterian granny used to bang on about “the deserving poor” until one day my mother snapped and asked, “What about the poor who are not deserving?” Who was she to judge “deserving” from “undeserving” anyway? What was she doing setting herself up on a moral pedestal from which she observed her small Donegal town, her hands busy crocheting blankets for “the heathen” from wool scraps?

No one talks about “the heathen” any more but I wonder how much attitudes have really changed from my granny’s day. A ghastly puritanism is still there in the insistence that the only poor worth supporting are those who are working full-time for cash. If they can’t produce cash they must have a product.