Don’t butcher services and hurt disadvantaged in unfair budget cuts

BUTCHERS or gardeners — which are they?

The next couple of months, and the unfolding of the process that leads to next year’s budget, should give us the answer.

It’s early days in the budgetary cycle, of course.

Normally around this time every year, government departments and ministers start preparing for the intense negotiations leading to the next budget. The Department of Finance will be seeking the deepest cuts possible, and each department will be trying to defend what it already has.

Mind you, the parameters are already pretty clear this year — clearer than they would normally be in mid-summer. The terms of the bailout demand billions in cuts, and for some months now Brendan Howlin has been leading a strategic spending review to try to force government departments to be far more proactive than usual in delivering up those cuts.

I hope he is genuinely encouraging them to be strategic, and that he remembers what one of his predecessors used to say about cutting. The late Frank Cluskey often pointed out that a good gardener knew how to cut and prune in order to encourage growth, but a butcher had different things in mind when he picked up a cleaver. For the last few years we’ve had butchers in charge of this process. I’m hoping they’ve been replaced by gardeners, but we won’t know that until we can assess the economic and social consequences of the next round of cuts.

In my day job, we work with people whose only ambition is to lead ordinary lives. They only want to do the things ordinary kids do — make friends, play safely, have fun, grow up well. And we work with parents who only want to give their kids the things all kids get — a decent education, nice warm clothes, decent meals, and the occasional surprise.

These are simple ambitions. Modest even. And yet it’s almost a cliché to point out that the depth and severity of the economic recession is causing hardship, to the point frequently of brutality. It is an undeniable fact that a great deal of the burden of retrenchment has been borne by those least able to bear it. There’s no justice to this in social terms, and there’s no sense to it in economic terms.

The official statistics readily identify the people most at risk of poverty in Ireland. It’s lone parents, people with disabilities, unemployed parents of larger families. And yet over several recent budgets it has been the supports for those people that have been most easily cut. Exactly the same is true for the public services on which many of them rely. Frontline services are being cut constantly, with inevitable consequences for the health and education of already vulnerable people.

The reasons these cuts are made is not because people who already live in disadvantage deserve to be punished. Everyone knows that they didn’t cause the property bubble or the banking collapse.

No. The reason is because they are easy. They can be made at the stroke of a pen, and nobody is going to take to the streets over them. That’s why the last two budgets both inflicted cuts on precisely people like that — cuts in lone parent support, cuts in support for people who are unemployed, crude cuts in child benefit.

I’ve often wondered, as I’ve watched the support for families being whittled away, if it’s even constitutional. It certainly defies the spirit of Bunreacht na hÉireann. According to our Constitution as we know, families are the natural primary and fundamental unit group of society. Our Constitution says that each family is a moral institution that possesses rights that are superior to all positive law. So, according to the Constitution, there is a guarantee for every family that they will be protected because they are indispensable “to the welfare of the Nation and the State”.

All of us in my line of work know considerable numbers of families, and their children, who don’t feel indispensable to the welfare of the nation. Quite the contrary — they feel unwanted, a nuisance, a burden. When middle-class economists talk about “moral hazard”, some of our families know who they’re really talking about.

But there’s more than injustice in all of that — there’s also economic madness. Butchery, not gardening.

A child who loves reading is much less likely to drop out of school early, less likely to join a teenage gang, less likely to get involved in brushes with the law. A child with good social and emotional skills and confidence, and a good bond with his or her family, is much more likely to be grow up to be employed and productive, and much more likely to be able to pass on those skills to his or her own children. A child who is resilient, and knows that he or she is valued and appreciated, is much better able to cope with all the difficulties life throws at him or her, and much less likely to lash out against the society that has been neglectful of his or her needs.

These are primary things — the kind of things that go hand in hand with effective and supported parenting. Resilience, bonding, the love of reading — these things have never had a monetary value placed on them, but are nevertheless capable of making an enormous economic contribution.

Instead of piling pressure upon pressure on parents who are already struggling with the vicissitudes of life in disadvantage, a decision by our state to invest even small amounts of resources in preventative work, or in intervening early before acute problems become chronic, would pay massive dividends.

Ireland would benefit hugely — socially and economically — from the tiniest shift in public policy towards prevention and early intervention.

We know it works in the health system, and that’s why so much effort is going into the development of a primary care service.

It works for children too. We can save money within the lifetime of the present Government by spending a bit more on helping children and their parents to meet the challenges in their lives head on, as families.

That involves shifting resources, thinking strategically, managing expenditure down instead of butchering it. It involves a high level of political leadership and accountability.

Speaking recently in the Dáil, Brendan Howlin outlined some of the reform priorities he had in mind.

In his words, they included much greater integration of public service organisations, so that services are designed around the practical needs of the citizen; the better targeting of services, to avoid duplication of effort, and the use of technology to deliver faster and cheaper services.

Well, let’s wait and see. I think all of us would support a programme that set out to modernise the structures of delivery and force them to work better.

We all know that can’t be done without some pain, and it can’t be done overnight.

But it is an infinitely better approach than the crude cutting of recent years.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. We’ll know on budget day whether the butchers have really been replaced by gardeners.