Is the Senator satisfied that the Minister of State is capable of taking this Bill?
Combat Poverty Agency Bill, 1985: Second Stage (Resumed).
Question again proposed: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time".
Yes, I have every confidence in the Minister of State. Indeed, because of the absence of officials of the Department of Foreign Affairs last night, I am grateful that the Minister of State is present. He might understand the drift as they say in my native County Clare.
The main thrust of what I had to say yesterday is that undeniably, if we are to have an adequate agency that will combat poverty, we need to advert to and accept the profoundly unequal nature of Irish society. I had said in relation to wealth, for example, that the wealthiest 5 per cent of the population owns 60 to 63 per cent of total wealth. One study said that it had understated the amount of wealth, that it should be 70 per cent and another study suggested that this wealthiest group owns 57 per cent; but there has been no significant shift in the proportion.
I also said that following the pioneering work of Nolan and Doddard it was suggested that one-fifth had 45 per cent of income while the bottom 20 per cent of households had just over 4 per cent of income. A more telling statistic is that after the taxation system had its impact, the same imbalance applies, that is, that the top fifth have an enormous proportion of disposable income whereas the bottom 20 per cent had a very tiny proportion of disposable income. The point about income is that the taxation structure does not remove the imbalance in the proportions for gross income.
The third point I made is that it is crucial to examine the transfer pattern of the society in so far as to ask, given this imbalance of wealth and income, to what extent does society reproduce itself in figures like, for example, access to education, different types of housing, participation in a different kind of legal system and so on? While it may be argued that there has been an evolution since 1963 in Ireland towards accepting some responsibility for having a social policy and even when you see a distributive component to that, the distribution is very often not in the direction of those who are unfavoured. The distribution of taxation, revenue and opportunities in society makes the reproduction of an unequal society more possible.
I had argued — it is a point I want to tie in today — that the consequences of poverty are not simply the most striking features such as ill-health and hunger which undoubtedly prevail. I was moved by a commentator, a person for whom I have the greatest respect, who worked with the St. Vincent de Paul Society in the late forties and who used very good indicators of poverty in examining a new case. He said they would look at the mantelpiece and if there was a bottle of white emulsion there they would know that that was a family in which there was TB. These indicators are as good as many of the more formal indicators.
We have to realise that, quite apart from the more dramatic indicators of poverty expressed in bad health, compounded by bad housing and low nutritional levels which lead to low attainment levels at education and so on, there is another dimension to which I want briefly to refer. When you are among the ranks of the poor your relationship to the State as a citizen is qualitatively changed. Consider the comparison between the attitude to someone who is renting a house on the private market, who visits an estate agent and a person who is a local authority applicant visiting, let us say, any house agent processing their application or again, look at the difference between an ordinary citizen visiting the rooms of a consultant and the person who is processing a medical card or attending a clinic. Compare the position of somebody who is queuing up in an overcrowded, free legal aid centre with that of a person who is being interviewed in relation to some complex transfer of property — admittedly a sore point at present. There is a qualitative difference in the kind of participation one has in society. With diminished participation, there is a reduction in status. This is a complicated matter and I was very pleased to hear, as I said yesterday. Senator Andy O'Brien extending the discussion on domestic poverty into the global context, where similar features are present, where the individual is encouraged in dependency. The same features of dependency are observable in those states where there is a great absence of resources.
All these features are important but this House recently discussed the plight of the old and the terror directed at them by marauding bands who have participated in particularly cruel crimes and who have operated with savagery.
One could argue that the systematic poverty of the old is in its own way, a form of institutionalised violence against the old in society. We are indebted to the St. Vincent De Paul Society, for example, for their sample survey of the 80,000 people who are old and alone in Ireland which was published in September 1980. There were some very dramatic figures for both Northern Ireland and the Republic. The survey showed that 59 per cent in the Republic had no hot water supply as against 29 per cent in Northern Ireland; 8 per cent in the Republic have hot water at one point only as against 9 per cent in Northern Ireland; 57 per cent in the Republic have no bath or showers as against 29 per cent in Northern Ireland; 52 per cent in the Republic had no hand basin as against 24 per cent in Northern Ireland; 32 per cent in the Republic had no flush toilets, as against 8 per cent in Northern Ireland. It also showed that 16 per cent in the Republic have outside flush toilets as against 22 per cent in Northern Ireland and that there was no basic water amenity and so on.
The figure for lack of exclusive use of all five amenities in the Republic was 69 per cent. These percentages of the sample undertaken by the St. Vincent De Paul Society to prepare that survey tell a tale of physical deprivation in relation to the old. It is translated into social deprivation when the old were asked questions about their perceived capacity, for example, to wash themselves or have access to washing facilities. Four out of five, for example, asked how could you wash yourself if you have no basic physical facilities. The elderly, particularly those living alone, have been experiencing a form of deprivation in relation to basic social services which is compounded by other social forms.
The other point that is very important is in relation to the way in which this deprivation feeds into other features regarding the old. I quote from page 101 of the report of the St. Vincent De Paul Society:
Loneliness afflicts two-fifths of the elderly people at varying levels. It affects 25 per cent occasionally, frequently 7 per cent, and persistently 7 per cent. As many as 38 per cent suffer at least occasionally from depression and one-tenth are constantly prey to it.
It is those figures that made me comment on the coverage of crime against the elderly. It is very necessary to apprehend those who are responsible for horrific crime. It is very important in handling that and in prosecuting the people responsible that we do not further reduce the circumstances and quality of life of all the elderly who are already suffering both physically and socially and also psychologically in relation to depression. We are speaking about a vulnerable section of the community.
A more frightening statistic emerged in the recent report from the National Council for the Aged in 1984 in their publication Incomes of the Elderly in Ireland. I do not intend to bore the House by giving a great number of further statistics. However, as can be seen from the table on page 100, 7 per cent of all elderly householders live alone. In 1980, there were some 18 per cent living alone and 12 per cent of pension dependent households were in receipt of a disposable income of less than £20 per week. When we take £30 per week as the cut off point, we find that 27 per cent of all elderly households, 30 per cent of the most elderly households, 70 per cent of the elderly living alone and 51 per cent of pension dependent households were in receipt of incomes of less than £30 in the same year.
On page 104 it states:
How could there be so many elderly households in receipt of an income less than the level of pension entitlement?
One can only hypothesise that there have been understatements of income in the household budget survey and that some persons entitled to benefit——
There is a vote in the Dáil and the Minister may wish to go.
Very well. It will not affect my time.
Sitting suspended at 10.50 a.m. and resumed at 11.05 a.m.
I had been speaking about the position of the elderly. On page 107 of the report there is another interesting point about expenditure on food. This point was raised by a number of Senators who said that perhaps the poorest families spend their meagre resources most appropriately on nutrition. On page 107 of the report Incomes of the Elderly in Ireland produced by the Council for the Aged it says:
In Canada, where 42 per cent on average of the income of all householders is spent on food, shelter and clothing, the spending of at least 62 per cent of income or more on these necessities is taken to indicate poverty.
The fact that more of your income is spent of the basic necessities is taken as an indication of being poor. However, this method does not take account of wealth, income in kind or access to a number of subsidised commodities. In Ireland, 54.5 per cent of the expenditure of all households in 1973 was on food, clothing, footwear, fuel, light and housing. By 1980 only 49.9 per cent of the expenditure of all households was on these necessities. This decline would have been even more pronounced had there not been an increase in the proportion of expenditure on fuel and light. I simply make this point to show that there has been an improvement in certain categories among the poor.
Reading through most of the documents that comment on the social policy transfers that are taking place one sees that there has been a change between 1973 and 1980. My own reaction to these reports is that probably the position now is that the long term unemployed are people who are more vulnerable than other categories that we would identify as high risk categories for entering the poverty statistics.
One of the reasons why I welcome this Bill so strongly is that it enables us to study in its complex totality the phenomenon of poverty. This logically follows, for example, from the experience of the long term unemployed. I want to make a point that is frequently missed in commentary on unemployment, and that is, that for the great majority of people, unemployment or redundancy is a status that is not chosen. It is a status inflicted on a person by fluctuations in the economy, be it contraction in demand, be it the impact of technology, be it different structures of national or international economic policy or planning, or, perhaps more accurately, the absence of economic policy or planning. The immediate effect is, of course, a reduction in disposable income, which changes the status of a person into being a client of the State in relation to State benefits.
As a social scientist for a number of years, I am personally very unhappy at the very few studies that have been carried out about the participation of the clients of the State in relation to the public provision that is made for them. The studies, for example, that need to be carried out are about the experience of being a person waiting for local authority or State housing, consuming medical services, and supplementary social welfare allowances or qualifying for unemployment assistance. There is an absence of study in this Bill. The study would open up a number of very serious areas that we have to face and force us to examine our conception of the poor.
I was very interested in a debate that took place in Dublin in March 1983. The Irish Times of Tuesday, 1 March 1983 reported a debate that took place between Deputy Kelly and myself on the subject of poverty and inequality. In one of his more illuminated moments, that brilliant commentator when he defended the wealth tax said:
"This is the reason why we made a great national mistake in ditching the wealth tax. No doubt one could find justifiable fault with the form in which, in 1975, the Coalition brought it in, but in the principle of it, I think there lay an important element of social justice, not a gesture to redistributionist ideology——
Note the comment there.
——but a gesture from those to whom nature gave the brains and push to build up material substance for themselves towards those to whom nature denied these things.
Having delayed the House for a great deal of time as to the causes and nature of inequality in wealth and income, participation, status, the way society is reproduced, that brilliant constitutional lawyer, that brilliant contributor to the development of Roman jurisprudence in the islands, deserves to bring at least some of that intelligence to bear on the subject of inequality and poverty in Ireland. The simplification of the complex way in which we exclude poor people, in which we produce an unequal society, deserves better than to have it attributed to mother nature. It is an interesting and honest comment because it exposes the fact that there has not been a very good public examination of our attitudes towards poverty.
Which social policy model are we carrying in our heads? Have we really decided that we are not operating the poor law conception, the 19th century workhouse view that conditions had to be so bad inside that they would not be attractive to people to run in from outside? That was the basis of it. From that poor law conception came the notion of the deserving poor. From that developed the notion of selective provision for the most destitute, the notion that when they were dropping in the streets, or as one French novelist put it, when the blood is flowing out under the door, you have to suspect that somebody might have been killed. Perhaps, if the poorest had decided to die quietly at home and not in the streets and in public, we could have afforded to ignore the problem. There is an element of that in our traditional attitude towards making provision for poor people, towards refusing to move from a conception of poverty to a conception of inequality. The survey I quoted yesterday showed the Irish public to be extremely high on compassion, willing to give towards identifiable extreme categories of distress, but unwilling to acknowledge that these had come about because of any kind of injustice, not due to bad fortune, laziness, drink and so on. I said they were high on compassion but abysmally low in a conception of justice.
Since I first stood for election in 1969, every time I have appeared to discuss poverty and inequality in public I regularly heard people making that remark. A friend of mine whose brilliance I acknowledge but whose social vision I certainly do not share, referred to the kind of analysis I have been prosecuting yesterday and today as some kind of vague redistributionist ideology. It is redistributionist because I assert that if you say you want equality you must be willing to live in a society that acknowledges it and you must be willing to pay the cost. There has always been a balance between what was suggested as freedom on the one hand and equality on the other. It is one of its most systematic betrayals as a Republic that we have lived with a claptrap of nonsense about private individualism. I could be provoked — but will not out of respect — to comment on where that has brought us even in relation to the management of financial and banking affairs. There is the nonsense that we have in Ireland, at any time, a latent group of private individuals who are bursting to achieve and who, if only we removed every restriction, all taxes, every restraint, would transform the face of this wet island. It is a patent piece of rubbish but it functions as more than a piece of rubbish, surfacing regularly. It is a powerful ideology. It has been used to abuse people, to stop us trying to see how we might transform our society, to have the dignified participation of those who want to participate in education, to have dignified health and legal systems and so on. The notion always is the disincentive effect of the wealth tax.
I pointed out yesterday that the majority of the wealth we were speaking about was inherited and that a great proportion of it — as a distinguished former Member of this House, Dr. Whitaker, has more than once pointed out — was the fruit of speculative activity that had lost us jobs and that had — I am now using my own phrase — given this economy the character more of a gambling casino than that of a modern economic industrial State. That is what it was. The idea was that you could buy companies, evaluate their assets from the balance sheets, then sell them, fork the jobs out for redundancy and social welfare payments by the State, and then leave it to the Industrial Development Authority to create new jobs, announce that you were somebody to be admired in society, and have television interviews made about how you spent your wealth.
I remember looking at one of these powerful new stars of Ireland being interviewed in the bath. He was suggesting that he liked to come home in the evening after taking these important entrepreneurial decisions that lost jobs, and made profits that would have brought you into jail in many a civilised country, eat a packet of crisps in the bath, and then interview his children one by one. I referred to that type of person as vulgar, amoral and dangerous to the Irish economy. It is they who were responsible in the seventies for putting this economy and its financial and banking system on the perilous basis it is on today. I very carefully say that, because I watched this "gurrier" element emerge and what they said. It was no more economics than going down to a betting office is economics. It was based on a very negative view of economic morality but it was worse than that in so far as it encouraged a terrible element in Irish public attitudes, the idea that when all these people were finished making a fortune for themselves, they could drag all of us up with them. It is like being in the ambience of one's favourite gangster, as he went up we were all dragged up together. Now, 15 years on, there are people suggesting that the State provisions, not only in utilities but also in relation to other developments in science and technology, this infrastructure that is never acknowledged by the private sector, should be handed to these people.
I remember my father describing some of the worst elements in the civil war saying that if you succeeded it was for yourself and if you got caught it was for the Republic. We are now in a new situation: if you succeed it is for the private sector and if you lose it is for the State. That is a fair description of what we have inherited from this period.
I welcome this Bill and its very broad provisions because of the terms of reference. I hope the new agency interprets them in the very broadest sense, to study not only poverty but inequality in all its senses in the terms I have mentioned. I have made a plea already that there should be a study of the people who are the clients of the State in different ways. I am sure many Members of this House have people who come to their clinics. Let us say somebody lost a job, or has a housing problem, or a medical problem. Not only have we lived with large volumes of the poor, but we have disaggregated them. In other words, instead of the 230,000 people who are unemployed, becoming the unemployment problem, they become the 230,000 individual clients of the political system. They are individuals who have lost their jobs rather than an unemployment problem. I have watched this in relation to poverty, housing and health. One of the curses of this State has been the kind of clientelism which has grown like a cancer in the political system, that lives on the economics of poverty, robs us of either the intellectual capacity or the administrative will to tackle generic problems of the economy and of the society. It is something that is to be found in the fringe parts of backward economies. It is the backward politics of a backward economy. It is a disorganisation of the poor. I remember talking to some people who lived in very had housing. At a later election one woman said she did not think she would vote because she had got her house; her political saint had delivered. All these individual trips to shrines of mediators every week serve as a disorganising feature among the poor. I know that the impact of the original version of Combat Poverty was the basis of the hostility of many public representatives towards combat poverty.
Since this State was founded, before it became a Republic, in the 'twenties, there grew up a tradition of integrity within the public service which I admire and to which I pay tribute, if that public service was one of integrity, it was one that was hierarchically organised with very little discretion allowed to it, bureaucratic in terms of its structure, and categorical in the way it dealt with the public. Thus it was — as I wrote this in a chapter of a book called Public Power and Private Gain— that promotion in the Irish public service very often was away from the public and you reached the pinnacle of your position when people hardly knew where you were. You had gone back and up and the most junior and inexperienced people were given the task of dealing with the public. This is the exception in Europe and the western world. In many countries people realise it should be the most experienced and older people who deal with the public.
That has been a bad feature of the public service and I think Combat Poverty directed attention to the way in which categories of the poor interfaced with the State provision and encountered hostility in that regard. I respect all the inter-departmental and intra-departmental teams that studied the delivery of assistance to the poor but they were not a substitute for the kind of work that the original Combat Poverty were doing. Yesterday I referred to the Dostoyevskian scene as the power structure of the community unfolds itself on the local hall. They were upset about Combat Poverty because they were using words that had been used in the United States war on poverty, words like rights, access, participation, equality and so on. They had gone miles past the concept of the deserving poor, miles past the concept of selective provision.
I see a considerable improvement in this Bill on the National Community Development Agency. I believe that it is not in the national interest to have Combat Poverty, then the National Community Development Agency, then Combat Poverty again, and then perhaps the NCDA again. I appealed at the outset of my remarks for all-party support for this autonomous body because it is a body that stands separate from the European provision. In the European Community, for example, the 1983 figures show that there were 30 million poor people, 10 per cent of the population. In the United States it is calculated that there are 24 million poor. Even in the most developed economies there is the problem of poverty that is in many ways a fruit and a feature of the industrial society that has been created.
The response in Europe, the United States and Ireland could take a number of forms. In the United States these programmes have been literally wound down; in the European Community many people say that if we are to understand the industrial society, this is one of its features and we must try to answer that. In Ireland I believe we are on a better track because we are acknowledging the concept of rights. Why should you have a Combat Poverty Agency to compensate for an industrial system which you do not question, or should you have it because it is wrong simply to leave citizens badly provided for, separated from the State with diminished status and without participation? I believe the second perspective is the one which a society which wants to transform itself should move towards and it will be possible under the terms of the new Bill.
The Bill raises a number of questions. I appeal again to the people responsible for research in third level institutions and in the Economic and Social Research Institute to return to the question of the distribution of inequality. Without knowing it, many of our most distinguished economists are providing a rationale for diminished transfers to the poor and for a slowing down of an examination of the nature of inequality. They are inclined to argue what the economy will be like in terms of its trading surpluses and earnings thereby begging the question: how much will we have to give towards the most deserving categories in the years ahead? We need a strengthening of the social component in research of that kind and we need a linking together of research of an economic, social and political kind. A very welcome set of studies has been carried out by the National Economic and Social Council, work that emphasises the importance of examining the transfer patterns of society. I quoted a very important book yesterday, Poverty and Social Policy by L. Joyce and A. McCashin. On page 92 it is stated:
What is important to know, however, is that an increased level of public and social expenditure by a country need not necessarily mean that it is becoming a more just and equal society and that poverty is being eliminated. What must be examined is the redistributed impact of that expenditure.
The purpose of the Department of Social Welfare and the Department of Health is to get adequate budgets for what is necessary. The purpose of this new agency is to look at the structure of society, to look at the quality of the provisions and to support and initiate such research as is necessary.
The functions of the agency are very good ones. The division of section 4 into two clear sections is very welcome. Primary importance is attached to four functions. The first is the question of integrating the poverty agency's proposals and activities into social and economic planning. The second is the initiation of measures and evaluation of such measures. That is a welcome advance on the first forms of the agency. The third is about research into the nature and causes of poverty. The fourth is the education and dissemination of the results of that. That, too, is welcome. The eight different subsidiary functions are in themselves important. They stress the evaluation function, the identification of possible policy options, the relationship to Departments of State and so forth. I think they will be welcomed and we will have an opportunity of commenting in detail on them on Committee Stage.
I welcome the whole question of the collection of information on poverty, the dissemination of information and beginning to know the nature of our society, how power is exercised, how wealth is held and how society reproduces itself. There is no act of God involved and, with respect to Deputy John Kelly, mother nature is not disposing chances. We are responsible for the kind of policies that will enable an unequal society to be winners in the next generation, and ensuring that society will be more equal in its impact. I do not want to look forward to the day when the study of poverty would be an academic exercise, a mini-industry within the academy. The whole strength of approaching poverty lies in the intervention and action strategies. We have learned a great deal, and I hope all these powerful individuals and groups have learned a great deal too. They have an interesting task now.
Is it not the mark of a true republic, the mark of a true democracy, that it would ask itself the question: did it achieve its independence to structure an income distribution that is exactly the same as that in Bangladesh? The base lines are different, the absolute income levels are different, but the proportionate disposal between the top fifth and the bottom fifth is exactly the same as in Bangladesh. Is it for this that people worked and asked the political parties to co-operate? That is the nature of the challenge.
I would argue that there is this awful problem that we are condemning so many children to the life experience of their parents and grandparents. I once looked at a survey on five parishes in the inner Dublin area where one had to go back two generations to find a continuous employment pattern for the head of household for more than ten years. The deprivations of one generation have been visited on another. Dr. Nóirín Kearney wrote a paper in 1981 in which she described a typical poor family. She said the family may be all right for a while, then there are children and maybe the head of the household loses his job and so on. The woman is beginning to feel depressed, she can go to a clinic and get tablets. The children perhaps are beginning to get distressed, maybe because of nutritional requirements, and undoubtedly there will be a clinic for the child at school. She went on to say that one can find the experience of a woman in poverty stricken conditions as a kind of a congeries of clinics, clinics for the things that arise in relation to poor educational performance, that good food, good housing and proper support facilities would have made possible; clinics for herself because of the distress she is under, clinics for her husband who is unemployed.
I am a little weary that after all I have said in this House — and I make no apology for going on so long because I have been interested in this area for nearly 20 years — there will be people who will come out of their centrally-heated halls to meet me at the door some day when I am canvassing and say that there is nobody poor any more, that there is no unemployment. Then they will rush on to tell you that they have not seen anybody collapsing in front of their house recently or they have not seen any emaciated figures wandering through the streets. They will tell you that they had some jobs to be done around the house but could not get anybody to do them, so therefore there is nobody unemployed either. Then gradually they close the door and move back into their miserable world, a world of ignorance and middle-class values and then they can read their favourite apologia in the paper, no doubt, that their children may go on to be successful modern Irish people. A successful modern Irish person is, as I pointed out, somebody who could be as easily trained in the morality of a crooked race meeting as in anything else, according to their criteria.
I hope that this agency will be successful. I hope that there will be a new approach towards it by all of the people with whom it will have to deal. For example, I would like its relationship with politicians to be one of support. We should, as elected representatives, be willing to see that the society which we represent is one that is in a crisis of inequality, that it is in a crisis of poverty and we should build on the findings of this agency and support it. The people in the public service should welcome the external comments of this agency and everything it will do. The people in the institutes should co-operate with it and support its research projects. The powerful church figures who may have something to do with it should not patronise it in the worst sense but should assist it and be moved by its findings. The kind of features, perhaps, which will be addressed in our social psyche will be ones of authoritarianism, neglect, bureaucracy, indifference, patronisation and so on. These are all matters which could be examined.
What I wish the agency, in a curious way, is some stability of existence. I welcome and appreciate the comments that have been made from the other side of the House welcoming this agency. It is enormously important that the work of this agency, if it is to be successful and if it is to meet the functions referred to in its terms of reference, needs to be continuous and there would need to be a continuity of existence. It must know that it will not be the casualty of a change of Administration. That is the value of the contributions that have been made by Members of all parties towards this agency.
I appreciate the references by some speakers to the unemployment background against which we are discussing this agency. It is an enormous backdrop to the discussion of poverty. The question arises not only of the loss of disposable income but of the loss of status. Think of the significant clue we get to this in the colloquial descriptions of poverty in an average home. Somebody will say that he has no work to go to and the individual will almost feel that he or she should not appear in public because of having no work. There is the question of the psychological wellbeing of people who are unemployed, particularly the long-term unemployed who now face perhaps decades of difficulty, perhaps the prospect of not working again.
Perhaps we should break the connection between job provision and income maintenance. I am in favour of breaking that connection because I think we will be able to provide jobs but not for all of our population. We should look towards assuring the income of households in such a way as to avoid most of the psychological and social ramifications and consequences of the experience of unemployment. This is something to which we have to address ourselves.
This debate will be very valuable and the research that will take place will be welcomed by very, very many people. We are not involved in a patronising gesture to the poor. Remember our experience, which was one of discovering them in 1971, cooling our ardour ten years later in 1981 when we had a notion that there is a virtue somehow in saying: "I am sorry but the resources are not there." This raises a fundamental question: the status of the economy as an instrument within a social policy and the right of these Houses to decide to have an equal society, a less unequal society or to take steps towards equality. We have that right and responsibility and we have the duty to go to the public and get a mandate for that and we have the obligation of demanding social policies. It is then that the question of technical expertise arises to use the economy and the developed instruments of intelligence to achieve social policy objectives.
I have witnessed the worst intellectual subversion of all and that is the attitude that the economic problems facing this country, including unemployment, are technical problems, that they can be given a status over and beyond any social policy measures, that they are beyond the understanding of politicians and that they are a matter of expertise. This is the profoundly anti-democratic character of the new conservatism in Britain and the United States and now in Ireland — the idea that you can remove features of the economy away from public discourse, away from the political arena and away from any accountability. The arrogance of the Right — and I use that phrase very advisedly — appals me. I took part in a programme recently in which I listened to the vociferous voices of the captains of industry. They were so full of energy and enthusiasm that they all felt it necessary to speak together, presided over by a vulgarian who found it embarrassing to have his psyche upset with a single economic concept. I do not apologise for addressing the complexity of these issues. I used the taxpayers' money to study poverty, economics, sociology and indeed other subjects and I have the right to ask: Who establishes political and social priorities in this country? We are in a very dangerous state where the hideous subversion, the greatest and most significant subversion, is coming from those who do not want to discuss the economy in the instrumental way that I mentioned.
Finally, I hope that this Combat Poverty Agency will, in all that it will reveal and in its practice and in its accountability usher in some kind of new awareness of the true situation in this country. One speaker mentioned £1 million for enabling it to function. I have said that that can be used as money to enable things to start but obviously the agency will need more resources. I will give an example of the way that this Bill can be interpreted because it has a research component, an action component and an education component. There is nothing to stop the community or a group within the community from looking at the entire life changes of its people. How can a community call itself a community if that is not done? Our present attitude is to put successful stories into the local paper. Nature has intervened again, in Deputy John Kelly's words, to lift an individual to greatness, to be "called" to something like a little family pride. There is nothing wrong with a little family pride or local pride but is it not better to be able to begin to look at, both historically and in present times, the resources available to a community and why it is and how wrong it was that so many had to be satisfied with no opportunity in relation to education, housing, the legal system and so on, and live with the consequences?
Is it not much better for us to live with the results of this agency and understand them and try to come to terms with them when we are approaching the crime problem? Again, I saw results from the inner city in Dublin a few years ago. I remember a very fine man coming to tell me that between 60 and 70 per cent of the young people involved in the newly-escalated crime in Dublin city were between 14 and 20 years of age.
I recall a document being presented to me eight years ago which showed that four out of five young people in trouble with the law showed a disrupted school attendance pattern. We could have intervened in the cases of those families and individuals when we knew that they were in difficulty with education. But I ask myself this question: "Did they have to leave the school system and get beyond the Department of Education and commit the crimes and go through the courts so as to qualify for the attention of the Department of Justice?
We live with that kind of mistake of not wanting to integrate our approach towards problems. It is much easier to give a quick reaction, to concentrate, as we should correctly but not solely or exclusively, on the impact of the crimes, but we should look at the genesis of them. There are many areas of policy in health and all these other areas in which this agency, if it works properly and if it is given the support and co-operation to which I made reference, will be able to make a contribution.
It gives me great pleasure to welcome the Bill. To me the strongest feature of the Bill is that we are establishing a national agency for which we anticipate some future and we are saying that if the European Community as it moves towards market integration or towards economic difficulties, should abandon its programme, we are committing ourselves to letting our agency run on. That is very important. It is an act of national responsibility.
An Leas-Chathaoirleach
Would the Deputy Leader of the House like to indicate if it is now proposed to take item No. 2? We decided earlier to take it at 11.30 a.m.
I just want to apologise to the House for the slight disruption of the time schedule, we are prepared now to take item No. 2.
Debate adjourned.