Ireland’s call: UN surveys put our two-tier society firmly in its place

I WAS watching the RTÉ rugby panel after Ireland’s exciting win over South Africa on Saturday, and George Hook was complaining.

Complaining! After a win like that, over a team that has stuffed us time and again over the years.

He was making the point that the Irish coach should have experimented more, blooded some new players, tried some different variations in the build-up to the World Cup. Against South Africa!

I’m not saying George was wrong, though I admit if I was in charge of the Irish team last weekend I’d have started experimenting only if we were 40 points up with 10 minutes to go.

But that’s not the point. Watching the match and the discussion afterwards, I kept thinking: haven’t we come a long way? Even to consider fiddling around with a winning formula before we’ve got it fully right suggested a confidence we wouldn’t have been capable of in rugby terms a few years ago.

Mind you, Ireland’s win was the icing on the cake after watching a totally incompetent English team being outplayed by an exciting and adventurous Argentina. But enough about the highlights of my weekend — what applies to rugby applies also to so many other spheres as well. In all sorts of aspects of our lives, individually and as a country, we’ve come a long way.

You only have to look at the UN Human Development Report, published last week, to see how far we’ve come. By comparison with a lot of the rest of the world, we’re almost out of sight.

You wouldn’t know it from a lot of the publicity that surrounded publication of the report, but it is in fact a sobering, even frightening, picture of the disparity between rich and poor across the world. Long before you come to the measurements that refer to Ireland’s progress — in fact, for the first 200 pages or so — the report concentrates heavily on the huge water crisis facing millions of people.

Thirst is only one issue. Terrible sanitation, water-borne diseases and all the mortality figures associated with a lack of decent, clean water supplies — one of the basics we take so easily for granted — are a way of life, or rather of death, for millions of people. The contrast between our affluence and progress, and the fact that so many other countries are going backwards, is shameful in itself.

But isn’t it shameful, too, that even in the midst of our prosperity, the quality of life for so many of our own people is a forgotten policy priority?

In its introduction to the quality of life findings, the UN report says this: “People are the real wealth of nations. That simple truth is sometimes forgotten. Mesmerised by the rise and fall of national incomes (as measured by GDP), we tend to equate human welfare with material wealth. The importance of GDP growth and economic stability should not be understated: both are fundamental to sustained human progress, as is clear in the many countries that suffer from their absence. But the ultimate yardstick for measuring progress is people’s quality of life”.

In order to compare different countries, the report then goes on to apply a formula known as the Human Development Index (HDI) that combines three basic and simple measures: living a long and healthy life, being educated, and having a decent standard of living. By those measures, the HDI puts us at number four in the world, behind Norway, Iceland and Australia.

It’s when you look at the trend and compare it to other countries that you realise how far we’ve come. When they published the first index in 1975, we were near the very bottom of what you might call the developed countries — in fact closer to the developing world.

As recently as 1990 we were behind Britain, the US, Canada, France, Italy, Spain and a whole lot more. We’ve leapfrogged all of them in that short space of time, and on the basis of those trends we are likely to be number one the next time the HDI is published.

But that’s only half the story. The UN publishes another league table that measures human and income poverty. It combines things like mortality, literacy and income poverty measures. And on that league table, we’re 17th.

I know Government representatives said the figures showing that huge disparity between rich and poor in Ireland were out of date. Nobody from the Government denied the good news, naturally, just the bad news.

THE truth is the figures tell us something we know instinctively is true. If modern Ireland is good for you, then it’s very good indeed. But if you’re not doing well, then you’re falling a long way behind. The gap is widening every day.

We saw that gap again last week when the Leas Cross report was published. Our approach to healthcare, and especially the care of people who are old and frail, has been systematically privatised in recent years. We give huge tax incentives to people who want to build private clinics and nursing homes because we don’t want to spend our tax money directly on such care. We delude ourselves that the private sector will do a better job of caring because we don’t want to admit that hiving off essential services to the private sector is cheaper.

If they were cheaper and better (or even just as good), I wouldn’t object. But when you take the tax incentives and our new subvention system into account, it’s not really private care at all. It’s an incredibly heavily subsidised way of transferring public money into private pockets.

There are no conditions attached to the incentives we provide. We give tax breaks to help the private sector operators accumulate considerable assets, but they don’t have to sign up for anything as a precondition for the tax breaks. No standards, no minimum level of care, no commitment to their patients. Could you imagine what would happen if we clawed back all the tax breaks and incentives from people who failed to obey the standards? But that never occurs to us.

And the real obscenity is that we then sometimes use these places as dumping grounds.

Some of those who died in Leas Cross were people whose level of dependency was such they should never have been there at all. And yet they seem to have been sent there precisely because the public care system didn’t want to cope with that dependency, and saw a way to get rid of problems.

Yes, we’ve come a long way all right. We’re miles richer than we were, and we’ve built an economy to be proud of. But Leas Cross shows there’s something rotten, something obscene, at the heart of it all. Human development is about more than money. It’s about human dignity, too. But we seem to have forgotten that.