Lynn Ruane: We must question why poverty is profitable

Poverty has existed through the ages and it has always involved a wealthy minority benefiting from the deprivation of the poor. 

"Poverty is a fortress without drawbridges." Albert Camus.

Recently in the news, we saw a series of stories connected invisibly by the threads of poverty and power. We saw record homeless figures of 11,300 reported alongside record high rents in the Daft.ie quarterly report. 

Alongside this headline, there is a constant flurry of news pieces on crime, violence, and public order. It felt like the repetition of a familiar pattern with the added discourse on the perceived threat to services and housing because of the arrival of migrants under Ireland's International Protection Scheme.  

The links between these news stories reveal something about the way poverty has always worked, and continues to work.

There is no one way to talk about poverty in Ireland. People experience poverty differently, and it has different consequences for different individuals and communities. Poverty, from my observation, is the most insidious shapeshifter imaginable. It has many faces, and its impact and forms are found in many of the social issues this country faces: addiction, poor health, disenfranchisement, and anti-social behaviour. 

It is easy to point to poverty when we point to social problems — but we must avoid the easy narratives and look at poverty as an issue of power, class, and wealth. We must look at difficult questions about why poverty is profitable, to whom it is profitable, and what structures work to maintain it.

Poverty is not an individual problem but a systemic, intergenerational one. The transmission of poverty between generations of the same family is still a prevalent phenomenon in Ireland, as was reaffirmed by a recent publication from the ESRI on intergenerational poverty.

One key finding was the "lack of evidence that the relationship between poverty during childhood and adult deprivation has weakened over time; rather, the effect appears to have strengthened between 2011 and 2019." 

The link between childhood and adult poverty has been further compounded over the last decade. Yet we continue to see communities attacked with stereotyping, generalisations, and comments that blame individuals and parents. 

Parents cannot be separated from their histories of poverty and deprivation. We cannot uncouple people from the systemic barriers they have faced, and we cannot assign the blame for their own poverty to them as individuals.

The decade referenced by that ESRI report was the decade of austerity. It is hard to overstate the devastating impact austerity had in terms of worsening poverty.

Community organisations and public services saw their budgets slashed, widening the gap between rich and poor. New research from the UK estimates that 330,000 people in the UK alone died as a result of austerity. We can imagine a similar rate of death in Ireland. 

In recent years, senior figures in the IMF and elsewhere have admitted austerity was a mistake which worsened the lives of millions of people. 

We should never forget the careless and often cruel way our politicians imposed austerity in Ireland and how they very deliberately dismantled any structures which would have allowed the people to resist it. 

In October 2008, the then Enterprise spokesman Leo Varadkar, as government shut down the independent Combat Poverty agency, remarking "41 down, 400 to go" of what he called "useless and expensive quangos". 

The closure of the Combat Poverty Agency as austerity kicked off was one sure way to ensure little accountability of austerity policies that would later pummel Ireland. When we look at even our recent history in this country, it becomes very clear that poverty is a political creation — and yet we still see individuals blamed for their own struggles.  The discourse around poverty in Ireland is always limited by the same narrow frameworks. 

The battleground of this conversation is usually organised along ideological lines, like neoliberalism and Marxism. While these theories help us to understand and parse the overwhelming weight of history, relying too heavily on these frameworks often restricts the conversation.

Some in society use the label “Marxism” as an insult to dismiss any attempts at an honest discussion about changing social conditions. But to speak about eradicating poverty and fighting for the end of the class system is to talk about something that existed long before Karl Marx; it is a conversation about rights, freedoms, and living well. It is about a desire for quality of life, for the full participation of all in society, and for security in one’s living situation and one’s health. 

Looking back as far as 375 BC to Plato's Republic, humans discussed poverty and wealth and the conditions of happiness. 

People with capital may often attempt to cynically frame conversations about poverty through a reductive lens in order to undermine those conversations. Derailing conversations about poverty ensures that people remain impoverished.  

We must begin to realise that poverty serves the powerful and use that as the starting point for our conversations instead. When we solve the problem of wealth, we solve the problem of poverty. That means we must discuss power and class, who is in what job, and why poverty is profitable. 

I am reminded of the analysis in Darren McGarvey's book The Social Distance Between Us: "At what point do we look at the root cause of Britain's problems, not in the lifestyle choices, attitudes, and behaviours of working people, and the poor and the vulnerable, but in the groundless assumptions, false beliefs, and prejudices of the apparently educated, cultured, and sophisticated? Put simply, if all the best people are in the best jobs, why is Britain such a fucking bin fire?” 

We would do well to apply this analysis to Ireland. If poverty is a political creation, then who does this poverty serve and why does the majority of discourse centre around the outcomes of poverty and not the source? The conversation must move away from the individual and onto the systemic and the political.

What we do know is that poverty has existed through the ages and that it has always involved a wealthy minority benefiting from the deprivation of the poor. And we also know that in Ireland, poverty continues to persist, and certain people continue to benefit from it.

Whatever ideological system we use to frame our conversations, it is essential that we don’t lose sight of these key facts. This connects those seemingly disparate stories we see this week in the news — those stories about record-high rents alongside record-high homeless figures. 

So, as readers read this article, there are people cold in their homes, people sitting on the hard pavements with their heads bowed low, women assessing whether the food in the fridge will get them to payday, people with disabilities living in consistent poverty, and families facing eviction.

There are prisons full of people from areas with high instances of poverty; there are hotels full of people who should be in homes. Through all these examples, people are suffering, and other people are profiting. 

When exactly will we start to have the right conversation? Poverty is the root, but policy and power are the pot in which it is firmly planted.

Lynn Ruane is an independent senator for Trinity College serving in Seanad Éireann since 2016