Next week’s budget needs to give struggling families glimmer of hope
It’s part of the tradition of Christmas in our house, that poor old dad is allowed to footle around the kitchen in late November. After all, if I burn the cake too badly, there’ll be time for the real expert to come to the rescue.
But actually, because I take it seriously, I’ve never made too big a mess of the cake. Baking is measurement, after all. Unlike other forms of cooking, if you follow a good recipe well, weigh all your ingredients carefully, and keep an eye on the oven temperature, nothing can go too badly wrong.
This year, however, I was allowed to prepare the plum pudding too. It made sense to my missus, because it involves doubling up on some of the ingredients and adding a couple of others (like a can of stout in the plum pudding, for instance).
But, to me, it involved an awful lot of multi-tasking. I set out to do them both at the same time. Christmas cake mixture in the white bowl, plum pudding mixture in the yellow bowl, then two other bowls for the fruit — that’s the sultanas, raisins, currants, cherries, and all the rest. Actually, we don’t have four bowls, so I got the fruit ready in two saucepans. One had a black handle to go with the yellow bowl, the one with a metal handle went with the white bowl. What could possibly go wrong? You know the answer to that one already. But I’m not going to admit anything. We’ll find out on Christmas Day. If the cake is as dry as dust and the pudding is soggy with fruit, then I’ll know that next year (if I’m allowed back in the kitchen) I should write down which bowl is which, and not be relying on my memory.
Anyway, that’s my problem this Christmas. Will the cake I made be edible? It’s not much of a problem, is it? There’ll be family, and fun, and warmth, and rest. I’m looking forward to it already.
Except I know too many people who aren’t. Too many mothers who are dreading Christmas because there won’t be warmth, and the children are as likely to be ill from colds and flu as they are to be enjoying themselves. Too many fathers who are afraid that they simply won’t be able to provide what their families need. Too many children whose hopes will be dashed on Christmas morning when they discover that Santa Claus wasn’t able to reach them this year.
More than any previous year, I meet families now who are almost empty of the one thing that can sustain them. Hope. For thousands and thousands of families, there appears to be no future at all. No hope of a job, no hope of ever getting on top of debt, no hope of breaking out of the cycle of poverty.
That’s the real legacy of the Celtic Tiger’s crash landing. I remember meeting a businessman some years ago who told me that, one day, all that would be remembered of the good days was a huge fleet of clapped-out, secondhand BMWs. But it has turned out much worse than that.
There are several vicious circles now. People who have always lived in poverty — and often raised their children brilliantly through hardship — are living in communities where poverty and disadvantage are deeply entrenched. Poverty is tough, but when you’re trying to raise kids in an atmosphere where there isn’t a safe place to play, where drugs and violence are part of the norm of everyday life, it’s a mountain to climb.
And then there are people who never knew a poor day, whose children were raised with all the advantages that money can buy. I’m not talking about the super-rich here, but what we used to call the comfortable middle class.
They’re living in communities now where you can’t see the disadvantage. But it’s there. Crippling mortgage and credit card debt, cars they can’t afford to insure, homes they can’t afford to heat. For thousands of families, Christmas — especially if it means keeping up appearances — is the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
On the other side of the coin, the capacity to help is being squeezed, day in and day out. There’s hardly an organisation in the community and voluntary sector that hasn’t seen its resources cut. In fact, I believe that any objective analysis would show that the community and voluntary sector throughout Ireland has carried an entirely disproportionate share of the public expenditure cutbacks we’ve seen.
In some senses, that has happened because it’s easy. It’s easier to cut a budget line that says “grants to voluntary agencies” than it is to manage other aspects of the budget. For four years now, organisations that work with children, with elderly people, with people with disabilities, and with homeless people have all been told they have to be able to do more with less.
In most cases, they have simply run out of capacity. That has meant that, in virtually every sector, waiting lists have grown, and the ability to respond to ever-increasing need has shrunk.
In its way, that, too, has contributed to a sense of hopelessness. The ironic thing is that hopelessness also robs people of anger. I didn’t march against austerity on Saturday or, indeed, the previous Wednesday on the issue of disability rights, because I was busy doing other things on both occasions. And I’m sorry I didn’t.
THERE were probably about 10,000 people on the streets of Dublin last Saturday — and yes, they were angry. But 100,000 would have made the Government and the troika sit up and take notice. Why march when you don’t believe it can make a difference? Why march when there’s no hope? And yet, we have to make a difference. We cannot continue to allow the gradual dismantling of a sense of community in the interests of a one-sided view of economics. There are, and there must be, alternatives to the robbing of hope.
Tomorrow week, we’ll see the budget. Will it represent any sort of turning point? Is there any possibility that there will be imagination and the kind of leadership that begins to restore hope to battered families and communities? Well, it was reported over the weekend that the Revenue Commissioners and the Department of Social Protection are in feverish contact with each other to try to find ways of deducting new property taxes from social welfare payments.
I’m not one of those people who are opposed to property taxation — far from it. But if we’re really concentrating to that extent on collecting taxes like that from the poorest of the poor — if that’s the full extent of the imagination that’s being brought to bear on our problems — then you’d really have to wonder.
The biggest responsibility the Government has in next week’s budget is to show us at least a glimmer of new direction. We all know there’s a long way to go, but the journey has to start with hope. That’s the least we’re entitled to expect.
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