I am pleased that our two major parties between whom effectively government has been shared in this country for the last 60 years are now agreed that we have a problem of poverty in the country and are now disagreeing among themselves about how we should deal with it. That must be counted as progress, even if the previous poor generation had to emigrate because neither party could manage to give them a living at home.
It is extraordinary, really, when you think about the scope of this Bill. I do not think the Minister has finally given approval to the accepted figure, or the widely accepted figure, that there are 1,000,000 poor people in the country. Later on I will take some exception to the words "poor" or "poverty" as they are usually and widely defined and what they are taken to mean. Something else is involved.
There are around 1,000,000 people who, by any standards, are poor. It is important to identify in some detail who are the poor, because the poor are not a homogenous unit of 1,000,000 people. They are an extremely complex mix of marginal groups, all of whom have, for one reason or another, been discarded or left aside or who never had capacity to produce and hence are marginal to the central fundamental role of the economy we have, which is to produce. At the top of the list, but by no means exclusively so, would be the recipients of long-term social welfare benefits, and while it is popular — and quite right — to talk about the inadequacy in many cases of the income of pensioners, it is interesting to note that in 1973 the average pension was about 22 per cent of wages in manufacturing industry. By 1979, despite five or six years of fairly considerable growth, the average pension had reached 23.7 per cent. At that rate of going it will take a long time to bring pensions into line with the accepted standard of living of those who are engaged in the productive process.
It is not so popular to talk about another very large group who depend on social welfare, which is our 150,000 unemployed. It is not often that you will hear politicians of any party say that the level of unemployment benefit or unemployment assistance is inadequate because we, as a society, have become conditioned to the propaganda which suggests that even though we have an unemployment problem, basically a large number of the unemployed are not the deserving unemployed; they are the "chancers". Consequently, we have a fairly vocal, consistent, widespread and highly sophisticated well-funded campaign which is chipping away at aspects of the social welfare code, in particular as they affect the unemployed. I would not deny that there are abuses and anomalies, but surely out of 150,000 people the anomalies and abuses must be recognised. It is a good indication that the sources of these campaigns and allegations about this section of the poor never had to deal with the labour exchange, never had to deal with the humiliations involved in "signing on" or they would know how difficult it would be to pursue any long-term abuse of benefits. It is disappointing to see the Government — and I presume the Minister was involved — agreeing to a review body to look at the anomalies to do with the things that have been highlighted. There are all sorts of anomalies in the social welfare code. To highlight the anomalies which lead to allegations of abuse while not looking at the anomalies which can lead to great hardship and great humiliation for people is a totally one-sided view of poverty and of the problem.
I would like to repeat here, in case it should go by default, that among the groups that are poor in this country the unemployed loom second to our old people as the largest single poor group. They are entitled to dignity and they are also entitled to proper treatment. They could well deserve to be left without the constant harping week after week from employers' bodies, from industrialists, from occasional politicians and from many people who should know better. As recently as yesterday there was another propaganda publication from the Federated Union of Employers about a worth-while and necessary improvement that the Minister for Social Welfare is bringing in, and included in that were three or four other suggestions for modification and improvement. That is not the way to create a climate of compassion and concern in this country for those who have fallen out of the competitive rat race that most of us have managed to benefit from.
Central to any strategy to deal with poverty must be a fundamental, real and substantial increase in the level of social welfare assistance. If we do not give people decent incomes all the other services that we provide will lead us nowhere. The unemployed is one of the prime areas of need, because it seems to be an area where fewer and fewer people are willing to defend their rights because of a very sophisticated campaign.
It is ironic that we should have such appalling services for single parent families, particularly in the light of the opinions about the sacredness of human life which is — I use the word advisedly and with some consideration — much touted in this country at present. If we really cared about single parents and their children, born or unborn, we would do something tangible about it and something which costs money. I would respectfully suggest that any Government which provided a comprehensive service for single parents and their children and identified that as the cause of another penny on a pint or another 2p on a packet of cigarettes would not run into much political opposition, particularly in the climate of the present mood about constitutional amendments. Yet our single parents are left out. They are not planned for by local authorities. I recently had a letter from a voluntary organisation specifically highlighting that problem. Local authorities do not plan for the fact that we now have large numbers of single parent families and that small units are not provided for them. They are discriminated against in the private accommodation sector. As previous speakers have said, if you do not provide people with the basic fundamental housing rights then nothing else will be of any benefit. The basic fundamental requisite for the abolition of poverty is a home and an income, and if those two things are not provided or only one without the other then you will not do anything reasonably fundamental to help people.
Our single parents are under-supported and are discriminated against. We have nonsenses in our regulations about technicalities like cohabiting which I believe means that if a person of the opposite sex stays over two nights it is a casual affair but if it is three nights that becomes cohabiting. Perhaps that is not in our regulations but I understand it is in the British regulations. We tend to copy them, but perhaps the Minister has a different definition of cohabiting—it is no reflection on the Minister. It is a nonsense that services that are provided and ought to be directed towards the children of single parents can be cut off because of the sort of relationship the parents choose to enter into. I do not think that is good social policy, and it will create further problems later on.
There are 80,000 old people living alone in this country. There are 40,000 in the Republic. Of those in the Republic almost 60 per cent do not even have hot water. Interestingly enough, the percentages in the North of Ireland who lack these basic amenities are much smaller. I have taken these figures from the St. Vincent de Paul Society's report on old people living alone. The extraordinary thing about that report — I am aware that this Government, to their credit, have set up a task force to improve the quality of accommodation for old people living alone — is that most of these old people express themselves as relatively happy with the conditions in which they live. I find it very distressing that we can have so many of our old people living in what are accepted to be appalling conditions. They are so conditioned by our neglect that they have learned to put up with what anybody else would regard as primitive standards of accommodation.
We have 13,000 travellers: that is the latest figure I could get. Fifty per cent of them are children. I suspect that very few of those are living in serviced sites. I think the term "serviced site" is often a misnomer. I do not want to go over ground that the Minister and I went over later one night here last week. There is no doubt about it that the programme that was set up ten years ago or 20 years ago has not come anywhere near reaching the objectives that were set.
There is a good question to be asked about whether a general medical service based on the idea of people living at home can properly respond to anyone who is homeless however flexible it operates. Then we have a group to which I have a certain particular commitment, and they are the homeless. The way in which, with the best intentions in the world, public and statutory services and Government Departments can go about identifying a problem always bothers me. It has come to my knowledge that there is an ad hoc working party involving the Department of the of Health and the Department of the Environment, also local authorities and health boards, and that they are investigating the problems of the homeless. What I find quite extraordinary is that the voluntary group with which I am closely associated, which I would have thought would have been identified as one of the major voluntary groups working in this area, has not been consulted at all about the problem of homelessness, the scale, the extent, the need of anything else. Not one branch of the organisation, in one area, was consulted in Dublin, Cork or Dundalk, and the national office of the Simon Community has not in any way been contacted by this ad hoc working party. It is that sort of experience that makes me a bit sceptical when Ministers of different and successive Governments talk about the role of voluntary groups and the importance of voluntary groups and the contribution of voluntary groups. There is a lot of codswollop talked by people in the statutory services about voluntary groups.
A group often forgotten in the discussions about who is poor and what is poverty in this country are those who are in institutional long-term care, particularly long-term patients of our psychiatric hospitals. Figures show about 14,000 people in long-term institutional care. It has been estimated that the total cost to the community of maintaining those people for an average lifespan in long-term institutional care will come to something close to £2,000 million. We need some imagination and courage to deal with these people. I would like to say something here which will bring down on me the wrath of a body with which I am closely associated and that is that I think the role of the trade union movement in the psychiatric hospitals and the trade unions in particular has not been of any credit to the trade union movement or to those trade unions. necessary worthwhile improvements like the integration of the sexes in long-stay psychiatric hospitals have been held up for years by the unwillingness of the trade unions involved to accept that simple innovation. I find that objectionable. It embarasses me as a committed supporter of the trade union movement and as an active trade unionist. It is terribly wrong to the people involved.
That is not to say that even if that were done many of our psychiatric hospitals are acceptable. There are about six long-term psychiatric hospitals in the country that I am aware of where the only realistic policy would be to close them down. It was suggested in Cork that the long-stay psychiatric hospital, Our Lady's Hospital, should have been converted into offices for the officials and the staff of the health board and that the money that was spent in developing offices for the health board be used to open a new psychiatric hospital. That particular proposal made very little progress, because I assume that the accommodation which was satisfactory for phychiatric patients would not be satisfactory for officials and senior management staff of the health board.
Another problem that the trade union movement tends to ignore is that there are many people in rural Ireland who are poor. In 1979 there were 40,000 cases of farmers where the family income was less than £2,000 a year. Can I say here that I for one think that what is called the rural dole is a fine, worthwhile innovation? It has been described by somebody as a subsidy to stay on the land: it is right in itself and it has probably minimised or reduced migration to the cities which would have produced further serious social problems which would have been wrong in themselves and would also have imposed enormous cost on our society.
It is also worth mentioning that in a society which believes itself to have provided free second-level education, 9 per cent of our children leave school before they are 15 years of age and 15 per cent leave at 15. In other words, close to 25 per cent of our children leave school at or before they are 15. When I found that out I was surprised. I thought I had some idea of what was going on in our society. I suspect that many people in our society will be surprised to learn that 25 per cent of our children do not progress beyond the compulsory education stage.
That is an attempt to put some of the facts of poverty, the scale of poverty, the extent of poverty and the range of problems to the House. They are complex and complicated and they do cover all sorts of groups with different and possibly even conflicting interests. They are there and they need to be considered.
There is another group, somewhat more difficult to identify but they are there. They are the badly-paid and the poorly-paid. Horrifying stories surface every so often about the payment of people in, for example, solicitors' offices, in the hairdressing business, in the catering industry, particularly in the smaller branches of the catering industry, of people being paid literally £15, £20 and £25 a week. It is quite astonishing, and in the context of those who would claim the incentive to work is being destroyed by welfare, it is an extraordinary reflection that people still work for that sort of pittance. That is all it is, a pittance. Mark you £25 a week is near the £29 a week that we expect a single person to live on if he is unemployed and drawing unemployment assistance. Pittances are pittances no matter whether we as a community provide them as a form of social welfare or an exploiting employer provides them in the form of wages.
People are poor because their income is inadequate, because the services that are provided, whether educational, medical etc. are inadequate and because the environment in which they are expected to live is inadequate. In other words their housing and their surrounding environment are inadequate. We could talk about this forever. These are facts, but that is not the end or anything like the end of the problem of poverty. The question arises then, why do poor people put up, as they do, with inadequacies of income, appalling services and often appalling environment? The one common denominator to all poor people is their effective powerlessness in our society. This is usually preached sanctimoniously in the media in terms of the farmers' lobby and the trade union lobby and all of that. It is not an accident that the poor are powerless. It is not an accident that they are inarticulate. I would like to elaborate on this powerlessness first of all. Is it not worthy of more comment than it gets that in our urban areas the poorer the area the lower will be the participation in parliamentary elections? Dublin's inner city, for instance, has probably the lowest percentage poll in the country. People can produce excuses about out-of-date registers and so on, but, in fact, I would say that the real poor of our urban areas do not see political parties in any way as part of their interest or support or part of their services. I think recent electoral changes, particularly in the city of Dublin, have suggested that perhaps they are beginning to see groups other than the major political parties as being more committed to their interests. I doubt very much if the poor see the Churches as being in any way on their side. I doubt this very much. I do not want to get involved in a long harangue about the Churches here but I do not believe that the Churches would be seen in that light.
I regret to say this, and I will get myself a reputation for bashing the Garda if I say it more often: I am convinced that in most of the large urban areas, for large groups of people the Garda are not seen as a protection but as an instrument of oppression. I think people see the Garda as people who turn up when there is something being lifted, when there is somebody in trouble but not really a presence to be welcomed as a sign of protection and support. We could argue about this forever but there is a fair amount of evidence that this is true. What is unquestionably true is that the procedures and the atmosphere of a court of law would be overwhelmingly oppressive to anybody from a poor background. The commonalty of interest between prosecutor, defendant, garda and justice would be far in excess of any commonalty of interest that the poor might feel between himself or herself and those who are there allegedly to protect him. The law is not equal: people are not equal before the law; the poor suffer before the law.
Indeed, those of us in the Simon Community discovered in Dublin recently that when it comes to the planning laws the poor are not equal because when seven poor people move into a house that is a change of use, but when a landlord rents out a house to seven relatively prosperous people that is OK and you do not need planning permission. When they are poor people, to whom others can object, then it becomes a change of use.
Finally, the social services, as they are delivered, as they are organised and as they are run could be nothing other than an instrument of oppression against the poor. Apart altogether from the inadequacy of the services, the quality and standard of delivery must have a humiliating impact on anybody. Our major labour exchanges are disgraceful buildings. Let nobody tell me that it is merely a question of shortage of finance. They were disgraceful buildings in the days when the country had a relatively high level of prosperity. I remember when I was a student visiting the labour exchange in Werburg Street in Dublin, and the eternal presence of a garda, obviously there to make sure that all these poor people would behave themselves and that all these unemployed people would do what they were told, did not exactly convey the atmosphere of support, service, care and consideration that ought to be the atmosphere of social services.
There is an extraordinary rigmarole involved in things like getting a medical card, and there are extraordinarily insensitive decisions made by people about running labour exchanges. For instance, in my own city of Cork the women's section is upstairs. No buggies are allowed upstairs; therefore, married women abandon their buggies and carry their children up. There is practically nowhere for a pregnant woman to sit down. The queues can take an hour or an hour-and-a-half and I understand that the chaos between screaming children and everything else is enormous and apparently cannot be changed. I do not believe that that is an untypical example of the way our poor people are treated. The quality of delivery of the social services is scandalously inadequate. One only has to compare, for instance, the quality of the office accommodation provided for offices of a health board and the quality of the accommodation often provided for the recipients of the services of those health boards to understand what I am talking about.
The social welfare appeals system is another classic example of the oppression of poor people. It is loaded against them. The person about whom a judgement is being made can never confront the person who has provided the evidence on which the judgment is made. People cannot use the legal aid centres if they have complaints about the social welfare code. They are specifically excluded from the range of services provided by the Legal Aid Board. All this I suspect — and I am not accusing anybody of deliberate design, — is in consequence of a philosophy about the social services which is influenced more than a little by the campaigns against welfare that have been sponsored by people who, in my opinion, would spend more on cigars in a year than a single person on unemployment assistance would get in about three years. Still they can campaign about welfare and so on.
What causes poverty? I think I shall cease to use the word "poverty" because it is the wrong word. Poverty is not just an accidental misfortune that befell people because those of us in the relatively prosperous upper working-class, middle-class and further up classes, forgot about them, but now that we have noticed them and discovered them, it is all going to go away because we have discovered our conscience and it is "all going to happen." It is not like that. They are there because of the way we have organised our society. They are there because of the values our society has enshrined in its de facto living as distinct from the noble aspirations that our Constitution might give us. For instance, we enshrine competition. We recognise the role of competition and the competitive factor in economics and in all sorts of areas. But if you have competition you have winners — who are all of us here — and you have losers. If you have winners you must have losers and you must have contrasts between them. If you enshrine material benefit, material gain and the accumulation of material goods over and above what we would all recognise as a reasonable standard of living, if these are enshrined as the measure of your success, as the measure of your achievement, as the measure of your winning in the competition of life, then quite obviously those who do not win must be seen to be less well off.
Therefore, what I would say is that poverty is not an accident but a necessary consequence of the way we have chosen to organise our society. If it is a necessary consequence of the way we have chosen to organise our society then they are not under-privileged, they are not disadvantaged, they are people who have to be like that because we want to be the way we are and they are, therefore, oppressed. It is not an accident: it is a necessary consequence of the way our society is organised and, therefore, they are not really the poor: they are the oppressed. They are the victims of the way our society is organised. It is fundamentally, before all else, a question of values. I do not want to dismiss the new poor, the people who are talked about frequently, the middle-class people who are victims of redundancies and so on. That is a separate and very serious problem and could be dealt with by services in a way that the structural poverty, which is oppression, cannot be dealt with. But the poverty of the new poor could be dealt with by services, income maintenance, income support and so on.
I am talking about the children who are born into a poor family. They are poor because of unemployment or are poorly paid or because of some family problem. Because they are unemployed and because they are poorly paid their housing will be inadequate. Quite likely, as a consequence they will be poorly fed. It is quite likely in spite of the successes — and they are successes of the general medical services — that they will receive poor medical care.
I would like to record here, in passing, the comment of a young married woman from Dublin's inner city about the services available to her, trying desperately to survive on an inadequate income. At one stage when she discovered the price of tranquillisers she said if they gave her the price of the tranquillisers instead of the tranquillisers she would not need the tranquillisers. She needed the tranquillisers because she could not afford to pay electricity bills and so on. That bears thinking about. I have heard it said so often that the one thing we can deliver in unlimited quantities to poor people are drugs on prescription; it sort of mitigates their own feelings about the hardships they are under. We cannot even deliver on the payment of an electricity bill in a guaranteed way. I have heard too many stories about social workers going from the St. Vincent de Paul Society to some other body because somebody in the supplementary welfare system had decided that they had paid last month's electricity bill: "These people are obviously not trying and we will not pay this one".
To get back to the family cycle, they are poorly housed, poorly nourished and consequently the children are pressurised to leave school even before they reach the legal limit and they probably have not been attending school in the last couple of years anyway. Where does this lead to? They end up in dead-end jobs, poorly paid jobs with no prospects. Therefore they remain poor and they are back into the cycle again. There is a myth — and it is often attributed to people who come to the Simon Community — that these problems strike everybody evenly and that one will meet all sorts in the Simon Community. You will if you look often enough, but the facts are that 95 per cent of the people who stay in the Simon Community night shelters were poor from the day they were born, are victims of poverty and are the products of poverty. It is not some sort of an extraordinary phenomenon that hits everybody equally. It hits the poor most of all, the products of broken families, the products of broken homes. That is what poverty does to people and that is what we do to people. There is no point in pretending that poverty is just simply something that happens to people. The extremes of poverty are also produced by the experience of poverty and there is no other way of looking at it.
It should be said that there are vested interests in poverty. People need people to take poorly-paid jobs. People need people to take the jobs I was talking about in the service industries in particular. They are needed. A proper comprehensive campaign to abolish poverty will run up against that particular vested interest very quickly. So what can be done? I happen to believe that a real, final and fundamental solution to poverty will not be produced as long as we maintain our present social and economic system because its fundamental values are contradictory to any aspiration to abolish poverty. A real poverty agency would have as its primary object to lead the poor to challenge the existing social and economic order which has caused them to be poor in the first place. I should like to quote the former Taoiseach, Deputy FitzGerald, in Kilkenny at the poverty conference last year. He said:
A poverty agency and the final objective of people working to abolish poverty would be to subvert the existing order.
I agree with him. A proper poverty agency ought to be in capital letters, subversive to the present social and economic order. The word "subversive" has been taken over by paramilitary terrorists and nasty people like them and therefore people do not like to use it anymore. A poverty agency would have to lead those who are poor, one-quarter of the population, to challenge the existing structures, the existing attitudes and values and the processes which create poverty.
If the Minister really wants to do something about poverty he would leave out of his Bill the various caveats, cautions and protections which effectively allow him to intervene at any stage in any area of the work to get rid of any member of the board who might be pushing too far in any direction. There are many points there that we can come back to on Committee Stage. A real poverty agency would be cast-iron, independent and given the role of leading the poor to challenge the structures and systems which create their poverty.
Even so, a lot can be done. For instance, I do not believe this country has reached saturation taxation. The report of ESRI, Paper No. 109, published last year — The Distribution of Income in the Republic of Ireland: A study in Social Class and Family-Cycle Inequalities — says in the conclusion:
As taxation on capital and inherited wealth drifted towards the inconsequential, an awareness of social class would have alerted policy-makers to the possibility that Ireland may enter the twenty-first century with an upper middle class so privileged and so securely entrenched as to harken back to its nineteenth century predecessors.
That is not a country which has reached saturation levels in taxation. Therefore, any suggestion that even on the services level we have reached saturation point is simply giving in to the lobby of the rich and powerful, a lobby which was seen at its most effective in 1973 when the wealth and capital gains tax proposals first appeared, and which Deputy John Kelly described as probably the most vigorous, broadly-based and intense lobbying that any government were ever subjected to, a lobby incidentally which was facilitated and assisted by a national newspaper which would lay claim to have a strong streak of social concern, that is, The Irish Times which became a platform for every interest group opposing that legislation. We do not have that sort of taxation because their lobby is so powerful.
I would like to remind people that we could cut military spending. Because we need certain forms of security forces to deal with terrorism it does not necessarily mean we need the kind of army we have. If we have social priorities I suggest we could investigate them. We could introduce a graduate tax similar to that in operation in eastern Europe for those who benefit from the services of the State's educational sector. They could pay an extra 1 per cent of their income in tax to pay for that education. That is not a particularly objectionable thing. It is better than a loan system because it would be related to people's ability to pay. I would also like to remind people that a country like Cuba — one previous political figure nearly lost his political life because the mentioned Cuba in a political speech — has a national product per capita of about one-third that of this country. They have managed to provide free, full, comprehensive education to the highest levels of technological education to anybody who wants to avail of it. They have managed to provide similar services in the area of health. As one who has visited Cuba, let no one tell me that it has been at an enormous price in personal freedom. I admit there are things that are wrong. That has been done at one-third of the national product of this country. I do not believe that we cannot afford it. We do not have the political will. I do not blame Governments alone. I believe there is a climate of opinion which the Church, unfortunately, has contributed to which does not make that sort of thinking acceptable yet. Therefore, we have postponed, temporised and joined the take-it-slowly-brigade. This Bill is a start with £2 million. It is funny the way £2 million becomes a big sum when it is being spent on the poor but it can be the sort of thing that is lopped off a budget in times of cutbacks without a second thought.
We need to change the political climate of our society. In that context, voluntary bodies should begin to look a little bit more carefully at their roles. They have been shamelessly exploited by the State. I continuously read reports where health boards claim to be funding particular projects here, there and everywhere. The words they use is "funded". When you ask them what "funded" means they mean "it was assisted by" usually to the tune of 15 per cent, 20 per cent or 25 per cent of the running costs. A health board usually say "We funded this project or that project" but what they are doing in fact is getting off cheap on what should be the responsibility of the community and the State through taxation and through the various welfare agencies.
Voluntary bodies provide all sorts of services. They have certain functions. Why is it that all the members of these voluntary bodies who have seen all the appalling scandalous abuses and inadequancies in poverty in our society have never really shown any political willingness to raise those issues? Why have they never made political issues out of the problems they knew in their home towns and their own areas? Who benefits most from the activities of voluntary organisations? The people who are being helped with the service are people like myself who get far more out of their work with the voluntary body than ever they put into it. That is true of 95 per cent of people who work with voluntary bodies. The personal satisfaction they get out of it probably far exceeds the sacrifices and the efforts the people put into them.
People who are in voluntary bodies need to have a look at their reasons for being there and whether a slight redistribution of their time into areas of political activity within their political parties and within the trade unions might in the long term contribute more to the welfare of the people they are trying to help than an uncritical continuing of providing more and better service.