Ireland has an underclass only because we look the ‘other’ way

WHEN my wife was a child, she was taken to mass every Sunday. Every Sunday, she noticed a small group of children, in what seemed to be reserved seats to the side of the church. They were always cold, pinched and blue. Dressed in khaki, they would troop in quietly at the start and troop out again, through a side door, at the end.

They were marshalled each week by a couple of nuns. The regular children would never look at them, nor talk to them. They looked hungry and miserable, but that wasn’t a reason to have anything to do with them. Quite the opposite.

They were the children of a local orphanage. More to the point, they were ‘others’. Or, as an academic said recently, they had been ‘othered’.

Later, my wife went to a boarding school attached to a school for deaf children. But there were also deaf adults, women, who had been left behind by their families and who lived in some distant part of the building.

These women worked at night in the school. After the children had gone to bed, they cleaned. They collected the girls’ laundry in the dead of night, and they returned it, neatly washed and pressed, the following night. The girls saw them only fleetingly, if at all, and were never encouraged to speak to them. These women, dependent on charity, were a sort of invisible slave to the daughters of the middle-class, whose memories of that school are still happy ones.

Every country in the world, it seems, has a caste system. And every country has people who belong to the category of ‘other’.

To my shame, I haven’t been able to identify the academic I heard using the term ‘othered’ on the radio last week. He spoke at the conference in University College Cork that was so movingly addressed by Philomena Lee, and he used the word ‘othering’ to describe the process of separating other people from us. These people don’t have a right to the same treatment as us, they don’t have a right to the same expectations as us. They don’t, indeed, have a right to any expectations at all. Usually, people who have been ‘othered’ have no-one to blame but themselves.

Although my mother was a hospitable person, in her snobbier moments she often used a phrase to express her disapproval of anyone she regarded as belonging to the lower orders: ‘NQOSOP’, she used to say (‘Not quite our sort of person’). If a woman came to the door who was judged to be NQOSOP, she would be dealt with at the door, and never invited in. It wasn’t, perhaps, as extreme as some forms of othering, but it was designed to inculcate in her children a sense that there were definitely at least two classes of people — them and us.

That’s how it happens. That’s how, in every society, we learn to turn the blindest of eyes. The instinct to ‘other’ is in each one of us, and when it infects society at large, things happen of which we have reason to be ashamed.

Philomena Lee, of course, was an ‘other’ because she was an unmarried mother. So were thousands of women like her. We built institutions for ‘others’, and if we abused people in those institutions, sure who was to blame but themselves. We’d hate to think, I suppose, that our society was prone to ‘othering’, but when you add up a list of words and phrases like Magdalene Laundry, Artane, Letterfrack, Bethany Homes, and dozens more, you begin to wonder if we were not pretty adept at the phenomenon of ‘othering’. Add in issues like symphysiotomy, and other medical procedures whereby one class of people could never be questioned by another class, and you begin to think ‘othering’ is an integral part of our culture. Surely not. The root of ‘othering’ is a lack of questioning. If it happens to the ‘other’ then it’s meant to happen. We’re not meant to challenge it.

Is that why so little is ever said, and written, about our direct provision system, for instance? Only last week, the political system was shocked when a report emerged that some young women in the direct provision system had been forced into prostitution to keep body and soul together. Young women who live, year after year, in a system that’s not too different from internment. If you’ve ever visited a direct provision centre, and seen the hopeless way people have to live, barred from making the sort of contribution they’re perfectly capable of, nothing would surprise you. Apart, that is, from the fact that we’ve tolerated such a system for so long. The only possible way to secure such tolerance is to make the people who live within the system invisible. Without expectation. ‘Others’.

A newspaper reported last week there are 9,000 cases of children at risk of abuse and neglect, and there are nothing like enough social workers to respond to those needs.

They’re not our children, of course. They’re other people’s children. ‘Others’.

On the law of averages, ten of those children will die prematurely. Neglect or abuse, or a life that has gone into a downward spiral, could well be the cause. They’ll become nameless statistics. ‘Others’ in death as they were in life.

But if one of them dies in some graphic way that shocks us out of complacency, we’ll react differently. We only know two ways to react — complacency or horror. We’ll start looking for someone to blame immediately. It might be the parents, or it might be someone in the community. But most likely, after wringing our hands for a while, we’ll all decide it’s the ‘system’.

And we’ll assume that someone, somewhere, has made good resolutions about reforming the system, and we’ll go back to being complacent again. But they’ve already reformed the system. They just haven’t resourced it.

They created a new agency out of the HSE, the Child and Family Agency. It’s less than a year old, and it’s already facing a financial crisis. Demand is growing and resources were inadequate from the moment the agency was started. That’s simply unsustainable. And what that means is that we’re at risk of creating a brand new class of ‘other’ — children in poor circumstances, living in family crisis, and growing up in communities beset by disadvantage.

They’re Irish children, with all the rights and expectations of Irish citizens, unless we take those rights away, by refusing help when it’s needed, or by deciding (for instance) that our tax break is more important than their needs.

We have to remember that just because they’re not our next-door neighbours doesn’t make these children ‘other’.

Only we, in the societal, economic and political choices we make, can do that.

Every country has a caste system. And every country has people who belong to the category of ‘other’