Facing reality - Work is the best escape from poverty

THOUGH the poor may always be with us it is difficult to understand why so very many of our fellow citizens remain in its relentless, cross-generational grip.

Never has Ireland afforded such opportunity to those who wish to secure a warm place for themselves and their families. The great number of immigrants joining us is testament to this. But, as yesterday’s report from the Combat Poverty Agency shows, a lot remains to be done. It is hard to imagine that in the Ireland of stocks and shares nearly 300,000 people are poor.

Maybe the time has come to say the unsayable: Our welfare systems, designed to help those in need, are, in fact, sustaining poverty. They have failed.

Though the cycle of chronic welfare dependency has been debated since the days of the sixpenny pint nobody has had the courage to grasp the nettle and say that the path away from poverty is found through work. Maybe the only way to end welfare dependency is to end it.

America may have shown us some of the way — when faced with similar problems after the failure of the European-style welfare system brought in under Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society project, they introduced radical welfare reform.

Some states pursued programmes that would see most of our community activists’ hair stand on end. One — Wisconsin — offered single mothers support for their first child but nothing for any subsequent one. Benefits were reduced and finally removed from people who refused even the menial jobs offered to them.

America’s great breakthrough came with Bill Clinton’s 1996 federal welfare reform, which placed an absolute limit on the period of time an individual could live exclusively on benefits. Five years during a lifetime, after that you were on your own.

A good number of the unemployed were forced to take poorly paid, dull jobs but most, in time, moved on to better jobs with higher pay. The real cure for poverty, it was established, was getting into work.

No doubt there are still a great many impoverished Americans but the debate will continue, more often expressing emotion rather than logic. One thing is certain though, what we are doing is not working.

No doubt those viscerally opposed to welfare curtailment will claim it is being done to take money from the poor. However, the reality is that it may be one of the very best ways to ensure that the number of people enduring poverty in this mega-rich country is reduced.