Fighting poverty - Crisis sounds alarm bells for society

AS European equities held steady yesterday key French and German politicians planned the latest round of interventions strategists say are needed to restore market equilibrium.

Hopefully, and it can be no more than a hope, this might restore some of the stability needed to encourage economic recovery.

At the same time British Prime Minister David Cameron was promising to “rebuild a broken society” and try to prevent a recurrence of the country’s worst riots in decades.

At the very same time our Government and civil service were working to try to find a way to satisfy obligations agreed under the ECB/IMF/EU rescue package that will mean cuts or tax increases totalling the best part of €4 billion in December’s budget.

Though all of those developments are real and their consequences cannot be dodged their scale can make them seem remote or almost academic.

However, this week’s announcement from the Cork branch of St Vincent de Paul, that they might run out of cash just after Christmas, brings the reality of our situation home in an undeniable way.

The organisation’s regional president Brendan Dempsey painted a grim picture when he warned that he has “never seen things so bad” and that the charity’s capacity to support those forced to turn to it for help is approaching “crisis point”.

Mr Dempsey’s warning that his organisation has been asked for help by many people with jobs — he mentioned gardaí and nurses — sounds a new kind of alarm bell. He suggested that cuts in wages, overtime, pension levies and increases in mortgage rates and other price increases have outstripped people’s ability to pay their bills. Last year, the charity spent over €5 million helping 30,000 people in Cork. This year’s figure is expected to be much higher as calls to its helpline have increased by 43%.

These are sobering figures and should give us all pause for thought. They must provoke the deepest reappraisal of how we manage our affairs and resources. It challenges us to define what we mean by society because if you can’t feed your children or keep a roof over their heads everything else is irrelevant.

We can all cite injustices but Mr Dempsey made two simple suggestions that could make a considerable improvement in the lives of many of those seeking his organisation’s help.

He pointed out that nearly half of the money spent by the charity last year went to single-parent families because maintenance orders are so easy to ignore. He suggested that the payments be deducted at source to ensure all parents meet their obligations.

Mr Dempsey also pointed to the situation where people who were once self-employed find it nearly impossible to get social welfare support. This seems utterly unfair and should be revisited immediately, certainly no later than the December budget.

The charity is a canary-in-the-mine organisation and if we ignore the terrible situation it warns about then we are careering towards an even more inequitable and divided society. That would be a disaster even greater than the one we are trying to cope with today.

More immediately we should, as individuals or organisations, do all we can to make sure that the St Vincent de Paul has the resources it needs to do its work.