We need fairness and social justice

How can we be surprised that we are back in recession when this Government hasn’t put any real strategic emphasis on stimulus programmes or investment in job creation?

Its whole agenda is not about achieving an economic recovery that will benefit the ordinary people, but one in which ring-fencing the rich and powerful is of utmost importance.

What has been instituted in the couple of years since Fine Gael and Labour entered Government has been nothing short of the purposeful wearing away of the fabric of Irish society.

Society? We hear about the economy over and over again, but who ever wanted to live in one of those? I want to live in a community.

Fine Gael and Labour have chosen not to focus their response at an economic level, with initiatives such as strategising for the alleviation of long-term structural unemployment, the up-skilling of an already educated workforce and the development of a genuine commitment to building the much-touted ‘knowledge economy’.

I mean, this is a Government which has absolutely jettisoned the State’s responsibility for supporting postgraduate students.

Instead it has grounded its response at the wider societal level in the form of savage cuts to health, education, infrastructure and local community services. There has rarely been a correlation between cuts in public expenditure and the returning of an economy to growth. In fact, it more often has the opposite effect, in plunging economies into deeper recession. See the applicable crises in Mexico (1994), Asia (1997), Brazil and Russia (1998) and Argentina (2002).

Despite this evidence the Government has slashed and burned across all these elements of our society as a means of responding to a crisis that originated in the economy, more precisely in the banking and property sectors. When you take out all the high-brow language and theory with which we are bombarded on a daily basis, that is what is happening here.

I expect that when Fine Gael and the Labour Party are criticised for this latest slump, their representatives will respond with meaningless phrases such as “we need people to be positive” and that “this is just the left trying to scare-monger with their doom and gloom tactics.”

Well, the reality is that there is an atmosphere of doom and gloom because the Government is making choices that provoke doom and gloom.

This October’s budget must be grounded in the principles of fairness and social justice. Not only because it is morally right, but because the contrary is failing miserably.

Darren O’Keeffe

Model Farm Road

Cork