Mick Clifford: €14bn windfall should be used to right wrongs of the past

Why not use the money to pay debts to those who have come before, and make provision for those who will come later?

Gardaí at the scene of a house fire which destroyed six houses in the Millford Manor Estate, Newbridge, Co Kildare, in 2015. The Government has finally green-lit a remediation scheme focused on Celtic Tiger-era developments. It could cost €2.5bn.

What to do with the bill-uns? What to do about the past and the future with their legitimate demands for justice?

The Irish government right now have the kind of problems must developed democracies would die for. The macro economy is in rude health. Opinion polls suggest that despite overseeing a catastrophic housing crisis the main constituents in the incumbent coalition have an excellent chance of returning to power. And what to do with a gift from the Gods of €14bn at a time when the whole place is going gangbusters?

We could start with the past, which hasn’t gone away and won’t for some time. This week, the housing minister Darragh O’Brien brought to cabinet the plans for a redress scheme for those who bought defective apartments and duplexes. These abodes were built, for the greater part, during the years of the Celtic Tiger, when an approach of throw ‘em up and be damned was invoked. During the times of a huge building boom, there was practically a non-existent regime of inspections to check whether all was being done according to the law and design. It was as if there was an attitude of “let’s not look too closely in case we find something that might upset the applecart.”

Two decades later, the bill is coming in for all the secrets and lies behind the walls of Celtic Tiger developments. The initial estimates are that it will cost in the region of €2.5bn. Those impacted are entirely deserving of redress. 

Most of them trusted the state with the biggest purchase of their lives. And the state for its part turned a blind eye because then, as to a large extent now, the economy was delicately balanced and all at the top were afraid of doing anything that might collapse the house of cards

The past screamed across the airwaves elsewhere this week. A succession of adults spoke to Joe Duffy about how violence was inflicted on them when they were attending school. The testimony was distressing, presenting the spectre of little children being beaten sadistically by teachers. And as with much else from the time it was quietly ignored, accepted even, as nothing out of the ordinary.

A tiny vignette from those times which illustrates the power structures in the early 1970s featured in a book I have written, Who Killed Una Lynskey? Una was one of ten children in small community near Ratoath, Co Meath. The family and all their neighbours had been displaced from the west. At one point, Una’s brother Michael received such a beating from his primary school teacher that he was left bleeding. The family patriarch Patrick approached the local parish priest to complain, an act that at the time amounted to a form of insobordination. The priest organised for the teacher to attend at the Lynskeys house to “explain why he felt it necessary to administer such a brutal punishment”. And that was it. No action was taken against the teacher. “As far as Pat Lynskey could see, the only long lasting effect was that his children had been marked out because of he and his wife pursuing the matter at all.”

So it went in those days. And now there is a retrospective reckoning that, at the very least, may be cathartic for those who were abused in a variety of ways. All of this has flowed in the wake of a report into sexual abuse in schools, published two weeks ago. The government has pledged to set up a fund to compensate the adults whose childhoods were violated. 

Some estimates are putting the expected cost at up to €5bn. That fund will join others set up over the last two decades to attempt to address, on a national basis, grave injustices. Survivors of laundries, industrial schools, Mother and Baby Homes have all made calls on the present to atone for the past. These are all legitimate. Often the money can never compensate for what has been done but the gesture alone is recognition of injustices ignored through decades. There is still plenty of financial mopping up to be done in this area as some of the schemes set up were deemed far from satisfactory by those most impacted.

At least the acknowledgment of today’s power centres and society as a whole about the wrongs done represents some form of enlightenment about the past. But while we have, in some ways, emerged from that strain of darkness, another awaits in the near future.

Climate change is not going away. Neither is the reality that the generation now in the early straits of adulthood may well become the first in centuries to be worse off than their parents. Climate and demographics are going to unload a hard rain in the near future. Professor Conor Murphy, from the Climate Change Advisory Council, recently issued the latest warning, pointing out that the future is already here in places like Midleton which experienced worse than usual floods. There has, Murphy said, been a “clear climate change signal impacting extreme events”.

Those battles to come with have to be fought with fewer shoulders to the wheel. According to Department of Finance figures “Ireland will experience one of the largest proportional increases in the ratio of people over the age of 65 to those of working age between now and 2050…while there are currently around four persons of working age to those over the age of sixty-five in Ireland, by 2050 the equivalent figures will be around two.”

Funds have been set up in cater for these changes but how serious is the effort? For instance, Sinn Féin in its recent comprehensive housing plan suggested raiding the funds at this early stage to pay for housing today.

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So what to do with the bill-uns? If a once off injection of money could solve the housing — or heath — crisis then the answer would be a no brainer. But we know that is not the case. In housing alone there are capacity issues. Apart from that, piling all the money into a delicately balanced economic model could have some serious downsides.

Why not use the windfall to pay debts to those who have come before, and make provision for those who will come later? It would, at the very least, demonstrate some self awareness that right now we are, on the whole, at a better place than any time in the past. It would also show that today’s power centres appreciate that their successors are going to have to deal with damage that has been passed down to them. It would certainly say something about putting money where the mouth is in expressing allegiance to commendable values.