Children and poor will be hit hard and it’s all in the national interest

SO, Budget Day.

The first instalment of national recovery.

The day we finally begin to be told what we will have to pay, each and every one of us, for the appalling mess our Government made of our economy.

It’s astonishing in its own way that the very Government responsible for the calamity is going to preside over this afternoon’s budget, because they should be long gone by now. There may be no other comfort to be derived from this afternoon’s performance, but perhaps we can console ourselves with the thought that it will be many, many years before this crowd is inflicted on us again.

Anyway, there will be endless references this afternoon to the National Recovery Plan, of which today’s budget is the first big bite.

And by the time the budget speech is over, one of the things we might well be wondering about is what genius dreamed up that title. As we’ll all see for ourselves by around half past four this afternoon, the National Despair Plan would have been a more appropriate name for what they have in store.

But wasn’t there fantastic hoopla, a fortnight ago or so, when the National Despair Plan was originally launched? There they were, ministers looking solemn, documents being waved, our leaders telling us what was good for us. And it went on for days, as the full scale of the sell-out of our economic independence was slowly and painfully revealed. A Dáil debate (but no vote of course), was accompanied by acres of commentary from home and abroad.

There was hardly a member of the Government who didn’t have something to say on the subject. Their comments ranged from the bizarre self-pity of the leader of the Green Party to the more usual self-congratulatory tone of a phalanx of Fianna Fáil ministers. “We’ve taken the hard decisions.” “We’re only thinking of the national interest.” “We’re going to put the economy back on its feet again.”

Through it all, needless to add, not a word of apology from any of them for the untold damage they have done to Ireland.

The Despair Plan was, of course, riddled with “tough” decisions.

Because it’s tough, isn’t it, to attack people who already have little or nothing. I’m sure that made them all feel big and macho, doing tough things in the national interest. And there’ll be lots more tough things this afternoon, when the budget is published. Really tough, really macho. In the national interest, naturally.

Well, you may not have noticed, but the day after the National Despair Plan was published, our Central Statistics Office pushed out a set of figures that demonstrate just exactly what toughness does. There was no press conference, no solemn-looking minister intoning his old guff about the national interest. There wasn’t even a single ministerial press release accompanying the figures. And I’ll bet you a week’s wages that the Minister for Finance won’t make any reference to these figures when he stands up to speak in the Dáil later today.

They were the official figures — the official figures, mark you –— showing how poverty has grown in Ireland. And because it takes a long time to assemble figures like these, this was the measurement of how poverty grew in Ireland in 2009. Before “recovery” began. These are the figures that you would hope the Minister for Finance would be really bothered about before he began his budget speech.

But you would hope in vain, because by the time he has finished his speech this afternoon, those figures will already have begun to get worse.

Why is that so frightening? Because what the figures reveal is that the number of children in Ireland who live in consistent poverty actually grew by half in that one year, 2009. That’s the biggest increase in poverty in any year since figures began to be collected.

It’s the real legacy of this Government’s monumental failure.

Last year the Government saved around €220 million by cutting child benefit by €16. In terms of the overall savings the Government was trying to make, it was a tiny proportion. In terms of some better-off families, the cut didn’t hurt all that much. But for those children already living on the edge of poverty, it tipped them over the edge.

And the Government went to save another miserable few bob by cutting just over €8 from lone parents.

Who, according to the official figures, are most at risk of poverty, and most affected by consistent poverty? Why, it’s children, and it’s lone parents. The Government would have known this before they cut the supports, of course, because these are the two categories of people who most consistently pop up in the consistent poverty figures over the years.

All the signs are that they are going to do the same thing again today. In the national interest, they’re going to attack children and lone parents again. And they’re going to plunge more vulnerable people into consistent poverty — in the name of national recovery.

In order to explain what consistent poverty is, I have to repeat something I’ve written here before. The “deprivation indicators” are the way consistent poverty is measured, and they’re set out in detail in the figures. A child in consistent poverty, or a parent in consistent poverty, will have several (that is, more than one or two) of the following things applying to them.

They’ll have been without heating in cold weather. They won’t have had an evening out in the last fortnight. They won’t have decent shoes.

They won’t be able to afford a roast even once a week. They won’t have had a meal with meat, chicken or fish every second day — so they won’t have enough protein in their diet. They’ll only be able to afford secondhand clothes, and won’t have a warm waterproof coat. They won’t be able to keep their homes adequately warm. They’ll never be able to buy new furniture. It won’t be possible for them to have family or friends for a drink or meal once a month. And they won’t be able to buy presents for family or friends at least once a year.

Think about some of those official indicators in the context of the last couple of weeks of weather. Think about children in that context.

Think about children too in the context of the last of those indicators. And remember that Christmas is coming for the rest of us in a couple of weeks time, when we’ll all get loads of presents we don’t need.

And today, in our national budget, we’re going to make all that worse.

One in 10 of our children deals with those indicators every day of their lives, and many of them are in that position as a direct result of this Government’s policies.

And many of them will live the rest of their lives that way, because of the link between poverty and education. One other statistic in the official figures shows that two-thirds of people with a primary education or below had the lowest incomes in the country. It’s all part of the trap. And it’s all in the national interest.

Of course.