Let's replace petty arguments over an extra fiver with an attempt to make the world a better place
YOU’D really wonder sometimes what kind of a world we’re living in, wouldn’t you? At home we’re playing games about the politics of nothing. In the US they’re involved in a politics that is becoming more and more bizarre by the day. And in the meantime, in Syria, there’s a politics of brutality beyond human imagining that the rest of the world, involved as it is in its games, is powerless to even speak about.
And we spend all our time, and all our emotional energy, worrying about five euro on the old age pension and Donald Trump.
In fact we laugh about Donald Trump. On Sunday’s radio discussion chaired by Aine Lawlor, he was referred to throughout as “the Donald”, and there was great hilarity about the latest mess he’d gotten himself into, as if it was one gaffe in a long string of gaffes.
But he stopped being a joke a long time ago. This is an intensely dangerous man. In fact, he’s not a man at all, he’s an overgrown schoolyard bully, with ingrained and almost psychotic tendencies. He is clearly someone without limits.
No real man would talk or think the way he does about women. It’s impossible to read some of the things he has said, casually, as if they were nothing at all, without feeling sickened. The thought that this creature could become the leader of the free world, and demand respect from others, is horrifying.
Fortunately (I hope) he has been found out in the nick of time. As I am writing this, Trump is just about surviving the second debate, while looking more and more threatening. Even his supporters are deserting him in droves. Thank goodness, I think it’s getting to the point now where there is no way back for him.
But I can’t help wishing we’d get beyond the trivial politics of our own budget. Later today you’re going to hear Michael Noonan and Paschal Donohoe unveil a package of measures that, in a majority of situations, won’t make a blind bit of difference to anyone’s life.
Sure, there’ll be goodies. And most of the fun, if you could call it that, will be found in watching politicians from all sides of Leinster House line up to claim credit for the goodies, and disavow any connection with the bad stuff. There may even be a moment or two of theatrical tension around whether or not Fianna Fáil will support the budget.
But it will be another wasted opportunity. We have poverty in Ireland. We have hunger, cold, and fear. We have massive inequality. Five euro on the old age pension isn’t going to address any of that. It doesn’t matter whether it’s paid in January or July, it’s not going to change anyone’s life for the better. It might help to keep the wolf away from the door for some, but it represents no real improvement to the treatment to which elderly people should be entitled.
Sooner or later, we have to have a real discussion about this. We seek to address poverty in Ireland — or we think we do — by higher levels of social protection. On most of the international comparisons of poverty, levels in Ireland would be unacceptably high if it weren’t for that fact.
But our public policy goal is an acceptable level of poverty. That’s why we dole out a bit here and there at budget time, and congratulate ourselves that we’ve won some political battle or other by securing a fiver for the old age pensioners.
But old pensioners who need healthcare will still wait in intolerable queues. Old age pensioners who need some support at home have to wait and wonder will home help hours be cut. Old age pensioners who need long term residential care have to depend on a scheme that is financially capped, or face the loss of everything they own.
And even when the services arrive, can we always say they’re on time, that they deliver what’s needed, that they treat people with respect, that they support the dignity of old age.
We’d rather give old-age pensioners a fiver a week, and boast about it as some massive political achievement, than ever begin to have a serious discussion about how we can put decent services, committed to the dignity of the person, in place instead. Addressing the need for services might actually mean withholding the fiver a week for a few years. That wouldn’t be popular, of course.
But could we even start by doing something a bit complicated, and seeking to target some of the fivers? I believe in universal payments, for a whole variety of reasons, but I don’t believe in universal increases. People who have occupational pensions, and people who are still in work when they qualify for the state pension, shouldn’t be getting the same increase as those who depend entirely on it. In fact there is no case for any increase at all for that considerable group of pensioners.
But all of this, and the trivial politics around it, faded into insignificance besides what is happening in another part of the world.
Paul Meade is someone I follow on Facebook. I’ve never met him, but in a post on Sunday, in one sentence, he spelled out the situation in Syria more succinctly than I could. He described it as a five-year-long Stalingrad, a global problem that no-one can walk away from. Some 300,000 people are dead, 3m are living as foreign refugees, 4m more are inside a hell on earth.
In a harrowing report in Saturday’s Irish Times, a doctor, Zedoun al Zoubi, is quoted as saying of Aleppo, “This is a city that will die. The entire world is watching a city dying. Aleppo is the third oldest city in the world. It’s 9,000 years old... It has seen earthquakes and disasters, but now, in the 21st century, the city is being slaughtered and the entire world is watching.”
Every now and gain, images come out of the city that shock us to the core. But in the main we watch it happen, powerless and perhaps uncaring. We could take hundreds, even thousands, of the children of Aleppo into Ireland, to care for them and protect them until there’s a possibility of them going home.
We could make it clear, at the United Nations and elsewhere, that Ireland is ready to play whatever humanitarian role we can to save some lives and make them better.
But we don’t even discuss it. Imagine a Dáil debate where there was a consensus that enabled every town and village in the country to open its doors to the children of Syria, that enabled the entire country to bury the petty differences that overwhelm our politics, to replace the arguments about who should get credit for a fiver a week with an attempt to make the world better, at least for a few children and suffering families.
If we could only do that, you wouldn’t have to wonder any more what kind of a world we live in. And we could. It only needs a tiny effort.
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