Shame on this selfish society

WE fail everyday. We fail because we inure ourselves to it. We fail because we comfort ourselves with dodgy assumptions (Folks, if you think Ireland is a classless society, you are soooh not right).

We fail because we have managed to magic away all the unpalatable things that don’t fit in with our wonderful slap-on-the-back image of Ireland and sure-aren’t-we-a-grand-little-country-all-the-same.

But amid all the fervid jubilation at the Fianna Fáil Árd Fheis this weekend, there should be at least one discordant voice. And it comes from the most unlikely of revolutionaries.

When Social Affairs Minister Seamus Brennan was Minister for Transport such was his appetite for the break-up of State monopolies that even the pinko-hater himself Charlie McCreevy had to step in.

But somewhere between being told by Bertie Ahern he was out of a job and getting the booby prize ministry, Brennan stumbled on Damascus.

A couple of nights ago I scrolled through his speeches on his websites.

If Bertie Ahern stole some of Joe Higgins’s clothes, it seems Brennan has done the same with his prose.

“The inescapable reality is that between 60,000 and 120,000 children are affected in some way by poverty that could blight their lives and sow the seeds for a serious lack of later development.”

Or on one-parent families: “Some 86,000 lone parents and their children, numbering up to 150,000, are particularly vulnerable and at high risk of poverty.”

A startlingly frank admission from a member of Government in power for eight years that never tires of telling us we have changed from peasants to toffs through its divine intervention.

Brennan’s Pauline conversion aside, the failure to grapple with this problem isn’t the Government’s alone. Newspapers and television are being swallowed by a quicksand of trivialisation. Prosperity has brought new problems, including the half-ignored one of self-absorption.

And we get angry about the wrong things. When we get angry about the right things, it is only until we get distracted by something else. The report by the Inspector for Psychiatric Services merits a down-page piece somewhere in the maw of a paper. The Combat Poverty Agency’s pre-budget submission just about scrapes it in. How many people can put their hands up and say they knew Barnardos launched an impressive policy paper setting out seven steps to end child poverty a fortnight ago?

Uncomfortable realities of Irish society - like that between 60,000 to 120,000 children are affected in some way by poverty - have become a little meaningless to us. They happen to others. We don’t see them. We don’t know many or any of them? We have magicked them into invisibility. They don’t vote. Or they can’t vote.

A myth has grown up that Ireland is a classless society when in reality it has become a predominantly middle class society. The proles - that core 4% long-term unemployed - live elsewhere. Children born into poverty tend to pass on the lousy hand they have been dealt to their own children.

Brennan, unlike his predecessor in the job, has made all the right noises. But experience shows that he often promises far more than he can deliver.

Combat Poverty’s pre-budget submission would cost €1.5 billion. To be sure, that’s not going to be magicked into reality.

A couple of years ago, the then Inspector of Mental Hospitals Dermot Walsh made a wise observation when I interviewed him about people with intellectual disabilities: “Any group that is in need and defenceless needs protection. It is our responsibility as a society to protect those people who are the most vulnerable in our community.”

Whom do we fail to protect? The 1,000 pupils per year who fail to make the transition between primary and secondary school? The 3% who leave school with no qualification? Traveller children living in conditions “far below the minimum required for healthy child development”?

The 2,650 children and teenagers admitted to adult psychiatric hospitals and units between 1998 and 2000? The 1,405 children who were homeless with their parents in 2002?

We fail them all. And what’s worse, most of us are unaware that they are out there, because they live in a world that we rarely get sight of these days.

Links: www.barnardos.ie. www.cpa.ie, www.welfare.ie