Government policy only payslip service to idea of social capital

THE past two weeks since hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans have been described as the two weeks that shamed America.

We all saw for ourselves how everyone who could get out of harm’s way got out. And they left behind the poor, the old people and people with disabilities.

Since the disaster, I’ve been wondering what happened to public patients in the psychiatric hospitals in the region or to people with intellectual disabilities in residential centres. Did anyone come for them? Were they protected from the terror they must have felt, kept warm and dry, fed and nourished? Were they seen as anyone’s priority?

You’d like to think so, wouldn’t you? But even though I’ve seen little news coverage of the situation facing particularly vulnerable groups of people, I found that when I went looking on the internet there is a massive risk to these people. Here’s a quote, for example, from a news release issued by the National Council on Disability. That’s not a lobby group, by the way, but a federal agency that advises the Bush administration. For that reason, I suspect the following is an understatement:

“People with disabilities in the Gulf Coast areas of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana are experiencing tremendous loss of life and devastation caused by hurricane Katrina. Current data indicates that people with disabilities are now most at risk in this situation and will need recovery assistance for months or years. A disproportionate number of the hurricane survivors are people with disabilities whose needs for basic necessities are compounded by chronic health conditions and functional impairments.”

Many people in the US have realised that what happened in New Orleans wasn’t just about bad planning and inadequate preparation. It was also the result of a gradual, insidious development - the same development Fianna Fáil was discussing at its think-in in Cavan last week - the death of social capital. When social capital dies, people stop mattering.

The aftermath of Katrina may well have the consequence of restoring at least an element of social capital to public and political discourse in the US.

September 11 certainly had that effect, at least in part. People rediscovered friends, neighbours and community, for a while anyway.

But 9/11 and Katrina are different. The attack on New York drew people together, it engendered solidarity, even in places where there had been none. When Katrina happened, those least able to fend for themselves were simply abandoned. And that’s why Americans are sufficiently ashamed now to start wondering if there is a better way.

Our Government appears to be looking for a better way, too. It went socialist last year at Inchydoney. This year, a UN report announced that Ireland is both one of the richest countries in the world and one of the most unequal. So the socialism thing hasn’t been working out very well.

So, this year, they discovered social capital. In fact, some people at the very top of Government claim to have been influenced by arguments about social capital for years. But social capital is about the institutions and arrangements that bring people together. And Government policy in Ireland, since Fianna Fáil and the PDs won the election in 1997, has been about driving people apart.

So the Government’s discovery of social capital is either an admission that serious mistakes have been made, or it’s a cynical device aimed at fooling us into thinking it really cares. I want to believe the former, but there’s a lot of evidence that suggests the latter.

Social capital could have been invented in the Ireland of our parents and grandparents. The meitheal was an advanced form of social capital in the Ireland of bygone years, a custom that enabled people to come together to do whatever job was important at the time. When hay had to be saved, it was a community problem - no farmer saved his own hay without thinking of his neighbour. And the seanchaí was a form of social capital. The story-teller’s fireside was not just the only entertainment available, but often it was a place around which a whole neighbourhood gathered, a place where they were bound together.

IT’S not just nostalgia that makes people remember the old Irish forms of social capital. They still exist in different ways. All over the country, there are voluntary and community groups, even quite a few religious ones, aimed at enabling people to work together for the common good. Many of these groups recognise the value of a sense of community, many of them are just trying to get social problems solved. In my work, I have come across remarkable groups of people - often women - who have come together simply because they recognise there is strength in solidarity.

They do it without any Government support, by and large. Yes, there are grants for this kind of work and very often the work won’t go on without the grant. But if you talk to anyone involved in community development or in solving problems within neighbourhoods, they’ll often tell you that the hardest thing they have to do is go looking for the grant. Immediately, you run up against an increasingly bureaucratic response. You’ll get the grant if you meet the criteria, and fill in the form correctly, and agree to have your project audited.

And from that moment on you’ll be treated by the bureaucrats you deal with as someone they gave a grant to, rather than as someone they’re working with to solve a problem. If you get involved in community building - which is what social capital is about - don’t expect to feel respected or valued by the system. Instead, get ready to be condescended to and patronised.

There’s a basic underlying reason for that, and it goes to the heart of the contradiction in paying lip service to the idea of social capital. Our system doesn’t believe in social capital any more. It believes in individualism, in consumerism, in the free market. Years of Government policy and action have rendered our entire system not just indifferent to the idea of social capital, but hostile to it.

You could give dozens of examples of how this works in practice, but let me give just one for the moment. One of the biggest destroyers of social capital is health inequality. There can surely be nothing more offensive to the notion of social capital than the thought that when we are at our most vulnerable it is very often the moment when protection is withdrawn from us. Yet, that is the risk people run with a health service that is becoming more and more unequal.

Now we’re about to embark on an era when we give rich people massive tax breaks to build private hospitals, hospitals that will only be catering for some of our neighbours and not all. The more we go on like this, the more we make a mockery of our pretended commitment to social capital. Isn’t it time we began to practice what we preach?