Ar an gcéad dul síos cuireann sé díomá orm chomh beag is atá an líon daoine atá i láthair chun ceist an bhochtanais a phlé um thráthnóna. Dar ndóig tá tábhacht i bhfad níos mó ná sin ag baint leis an cheist seo.
I have waited for some time to speak on the problem of poverty and the role of the combat poverty agency and its new suggested alternative. I welcome this opportunity this evening. It is appropriate, at the beginning to straighten out a few distinctions. Houses of Parliament have been talking about poverty for a long time. Indeed, the subject of sociology, with which I have been associated for some years past, began with a concern for poverty. The first poverty studies in Britain led originally to the passing of the old age pensions legislation which gave an old age pension for the first time. There is an uncanny similarity in the conduct of the public, Houses of Parliament and those who have power to deal with the problem of the poor. The poor are discovered and then some suggestions are made about the problem of poverty. When explanations are perceived as insufficient, and policies fail, usually there is a fatalist moan that the poor you will always have with you. The poor are forgotten again, to be discovered decades later.
In the Irish case, we have gone exactly the road of the United States and of Britain. In the sixties, Fortune magazine of the United States proudly, in a fit of hubris, in its editorial said: “There are now no poor Americans.” Six months later, it discovered millions of poor Americans. In 1964, the American war on poverty was declared. It began the predictable stages of the cycle. How many people were poor in the United States, the research scientists asked. These were measured and estimated. What then should we do about the problem of poverty within particularly urban areas? Policies were devised and then, after a few years, when the programmes were being wound up, the suggestion was made “Well, really you are talking about black families, and black people have different family relationships. The role of the mother is different. The child-rearing practices are different and you will always have a problem like that. No matter how much money you spend on the poor, they will insist on being poor.
Britain had a similar programme — a community development programme, very like the Government's suggestion. It, too, went through the cycle of discovering the poor, devising policies; the policies failed and the suggestion was made that poverty was something endemic in their lifestyle. The poor made love differently, we were told, and the relationship of mothers to their children differed and so forth. It is some features in the lifestyle of the poor themselves that are usually blamed.
The Minister is a humane man and one to whom I have often paid tribute in this House in many respects. However, the speech I have heard from him today is one which I would have preferred not to hear, this "state of Irish affluence" speech. We went through the motions of discovering the poor. In 1971, in Kilkenny a number of papers were read to the Conference on the Poor. The Economic and Social Research Institute on 18 April 1972, decided to give a whole day to the poor and published the results of their deliberations in a broadsheet in October 1972, Research Priorities in Poverty Research in Ireland. Thus it went on. We formed a programme and implemented the programme. The programme was, of course, attacked and I will turn in a few moments to the reasons why. Then, in 1980, the Government of the day scrapped the programme. It was a waste of time. And on we go, to wait a few more decades until it is time to take out the subject of poverty again.
One of the speeches I heard made reference to the absence of new information since 1971. I was one of the authors, in 1974, of the Labour Party's policy document "Poverty in Ireland", three years after the date mentioned. There is ample evidence available as far back as 1977 on the extent of poverty here, whether one is talking about farm incomes, categories, different kinds of amenities and so on. All the information is there. There is no shortage of information.
In 1974, speaking about the topic of poverty — and here I agree with the previous speaker — I said: "It is impossible to talk about the problem of poverty unless you are willing to talk about the problem of inequality. Inequality is the real base of poverty." In a debate such as this it is time that we faced up to some fundamentals about our own attitude to the poor. I read the Minister's speech last evening and listened to the speech this evening about the change which has taken place in rural Ireland, with its rural electrification, the children going to school, the people not emigrating but applying for grants and everyone moving about in greater conditions of prosperity. This is a bland description of an uncaring society for the most part — and the judgment is not mine. The European Commission in studying and examining attitudes to poverty in Europe found a very interesting and schizophrenic fact about Irish attitudes to poverty. We were high on compassion when we knew who the poor were and we had them there, kept poor, but we were low on justice. Less than one person in six believed that the poor for example, were poor because of any inherent injustice in the system. We were good on compassion, low on justice. That is the characteristic of all Government statements on this topic over the decades.
If, for example, a Government, as we heard last evening, were to say "We are the party that brought in this level of benefit, or increased this level of benefit, or extended it," and so on, what is the attitude that lurks behind that? Can you truthfully say that if you use phraseology like that, you believe in a concept of rights within the society, that people are entitled, as a right, to a decent standard of housing, of employment, of education and so on? It sounds better to be concessionary: we are the people who gave this, that or the other, identifying with the State.
Now it is time for me to tell the reason why the combat poverty approach has been attacked over the years by people who were a mixture of ignorance and prejudice and had a deep commitment to inequality. The combat poverty approach had three principles in its pilot project. It set out to create the concept of rights within welfare. It had a welfare rights project. It set out to change the demeaning term "home assistance". Its most important point and the one which was to bring the wrath of different people on it — was its community action research projects. These projects set about breaking dependency and in doing that, opposed inequality and drew attention to the extent of inequality within communities. Let us hear an answer to this question when we hear further discussions on this new agency—is it suggested that within communities at the moment there is equity and an attitude which can be extended to include everybody, that incorporates the notion of justice? I would argue that, in the concept of community in Ireland there lie great power differences that systematically discriminate against the weak and the poor. The action research projects opposed inequality and they also opposed brokerage — something I have written about elsewhere as gombeenism. It suggested to people receiving benefits from the State that they were entitled to them as a matter of right. It suggested there was something wrong with people playing the game of being political saints, intervening between the needs of the people and what the State was distributing in its meagre allotments in health, social welfare, and so on. It drew the wrath of brokers who attacked the Community Action Project every month of every year it was in existence until, finally, they succeeded in getting it scrapped in 1980. It was not accidental that that great party of brokerage, Fianna Fáil, were the party who wound up the Combat Poverty Scheme.
Let me be generous in acknowledging the sources from which the attacks came on the pilot schemes. It attacked bureaucracy. It said there was something wrong with a society in which a woman would wheel a push car into a housing office, go to the counter and be told by some person he was sorry but that there was nothing for her. That is no way in which a public official should deal with someone who has a real housing need. The action research projects, working within the community, upset politicians, bishops and bureaucrats. These, in turn, responded as one might expect: they criticised the combat poverty programmes and asked if it was necessary to be stirring up all this trouble and drawing attention to the sources of oppression within bureaucracy, to inequality and the abuse of the relationship between the State and the individual that is brokerage. Of course, you could do something neat. You could scream murder when the blood flows out under the door. When the poorest people are in great distress, there is something comfortable about handing out this little bit and judging your contribution to the evolution of the Irish State by saying "We gave a little more".
These were the sources of attack on the combat poverty programme from the very beginning. My party will give this new agency a chance. We welcome anything that will come to the relief of people who are suffering and in great want. It is not our business to stand in the way of any constructive suggestions which will come forward, but it is appropriate for us to look at the basis of what were the guiding principles of our own approach. We never said that an approach towards assessing the nature of poverty or eliminating poverty was the same thing as measuring the degree of distress. If you say you are in favour of distress, you put the State into some kind of relationship with the public of being a kind of alms giver. Perhaps that is the relationship which some people in this House want. But those of us who always argued for an effective poverty programme said it must address the question of the distribution of power and resources in society and that it must be free to speak of the extent, the nature and the sources of inequality. That was why the community action projects had their particular character. There is a cosiness to the relief of distress that is an unnecessary discomfort in approaching the problem of poverty.
It is appropriate in this National Assembly that we face up to some more hyprocritical attitudes that are frequently expressed in the media in relation to the poor. I have heard people saying there is no real poverty now. What do people want by way of proof to show that there is poverty? Of course, there is poverty across all the different categories, from old people living alone on fixed incomes to very large families living on inadequate diets and who cannot afford to attend school and to women who are breaking down because of the economic and social strain put on their households. We do not want to recognise the extent of poverty today. I have news for people who might hold such notions. Even people who agree that there is poverty express a fashionable explanation that it is their own fault. When I hear of this programme being placed under the Department of Health rather than under the Department of Social Welfare, I ask if this is an indication that poverty is some kind of a pathology or a sickness. Poverty is about inequality and has to do with planning and the distribution of resources. There are only two explanations of poverty to which I would like to draw attention. One is that when you had met enough poor people you would find basic characteristics which were common in their situation and that after a while you would identify the reasons why these people made themselves poor. That had a good long innings — the stuff about helping people to pull themselves up from degrees of need. That is rhetoric.
I defy anyone on the other side of the House to produce one scientific shred of evidence to show it is not the dominant opinion of sociologists and economists that poverty has to be approached by way of structural explanation. You have to look at the structure of the economy to find out who is made wealthy, unaccountably, without paying just taxation, and who is made poor by the distribution both of income and of life chances and opportunities. It is that which is missing in these vague notions about community development, because that enables one to gloss over the inequalities of structure, power, privilege, wealth and of the unequal distribution of resources. It enables one to escape altogether the question of dependency, and it is dependency that is important. It is very interesting that the developing countries are telling us they want the aid given to them to be structured in a way that will not encourage dependency. Here we are in our State with every penny we spend on the services suggesting the people feel dependent. I am not saying there is anything wrong with people trying to cut through public representatives and bureaucracy, but it is time we asked ourselves what will people feel in their personal relation with the State when they have to have relationships mediated for them. It is time we faced up to what that tells us about ourselves.
In dealing with this question of explaining poverty there are a few other points I would like to make. To all those who might be hankering after the idea that there are some people who have made themselves poor and keep themselves poor by the possession of some characteristics, the Economic and Social Research Institute have published research which shows that the poor are not a simple, homogenous population, that people move in and out of poverty through their life-cycle. For example, some people are on a high disposable income for a certain time and, suddenly, because of large families, there is a considerable demand on their incomes and they become poor. Perhaps, later on, when their families have moved away or assist the household income, they are not within the acute categories of the poor. But the poor are not a simple population. Poverty is something we do: it is something we create through inequality.
In the time that is available to me I shall turn to another aspect of the question of poverty. We can approach the question objectively through an anlysis of the sources of inequality within the economy and in society, but there is another side to poverty which is also important. It is its attitudinal basis. A report of a vague kind of research is being published which suggests that some people feel that if they have not a colour television set they are poor. I am not interested in these vague indicators. What I am interested in is the very worst kind of poverty which extends a psychological attitude to the poor by the majority of the population.
We must ask ourselves what is it that props up the basis of our ethical vision in society, a heavily privatised view of the world through which our emphasis is on personal security deriving from notions of private property, that looks at the poor as a problem when we should be able to include them in our vision as individuals who are entitled by right to participate equally in our society. Let us be clear about that point on participation.
Participation is crucial. If you are unemployed you begin to lose levels of relationships with your family. You have devalued relationships with your children. The level of relationship possibly moves on into medical problems. It creates difficulties for you in relation to housing. When we have a combination of these characteristics we compound the problem of poverty, and such a combination would be in a budget, for instance, which allocates millions for the building of prisons so that we can lock up the children of the poor. We regard it as a great problem if some youngsters are involved in acts of vandalism and we have not got prisons to send them to.
Surveys in the inner city areas will show us very clearly that 85 per cent of the children in one year had not the experience of either parent working consecutively for three years — unemployed for three to four years. Instead of trying to understand the manner in which bad housing, unemployment, poor educational prospects, diminished diet, the whole question of nutrition, all hang together to remove these children from equal participation in society, our response is prison. I remember a Deputy from that side of the House travelling to the other end of the country to have his photograph taken opening a children's prison, arms stretched wide beholding this great monument to ignorance and prejudice against approaching the question of children in trouble instead of intervening at the level of the source of the poverty that created the difficulties for those children, for their fathers and their mothers.
That is what is important. When we talk about being poor it is not about having shillings in your pocket; it is not even about being able to buy enough to eat or to pay your rent. It is about your relationship to all parts of society. Can we say truthfully that when people come before the institutions of the law that the poor can participate equally? Of course they cannot, and their children cannot, and that is the difference involved in a community programmed against poverty as designed by people like Deputy Eileen Desmond and, before her, Deputy Cluskey. The project then designed would have been able to look at every facet of participation in society, and where there was diminished participation as a function of being poor, be it in relation to jobs, housing, to the consumption of health services, to social welfare, to the law, we could have examined every one of these. There is one hell of a difference between such an approach and a lecture on self-help, on pulling yourself up and breaking the inherent goodness of the middle class to those who have unfortunately missed out.
I find offensive these celebratory notions that everything is fine in the Irish community if only we could extend its shadow to include the problems of people who are poor. It is rooted in inequality, in backwardness in political terms; it hangs on and stinks of brokerage. It has all the old notions of giving out bits and pieces and telling people they should be happy. It contains nothing to encourage respect for our people.
I would ask the Minister do we want to change the whole relationship in regard to the participation of the poor in the labour exchanges. If you go in to buy a house from an estate agent you can sit down in a plush chair, but if you go in to say your life is wrecked, perhaps suddenly, by your employer telling you that your job has gone, you have to stand up and wait outside a shutter. Do we want to end all that in society?
That would be doing something about the poor. It is not about money but about equal participation in society. For example, in relation to legal aid, and the whole question of the inadequacy which people feel when approaching the law, do we want to ask not how poor people will meet the demands of the legal profession but how the legal profession will meet the demands of the poor? Do we want to face the medical profession and say to them that it is a gift to be able to train to heal and that it is time we want people who have taken these resources from society to use these facilities and this training to help the poor?
That would be doing something about the poor, and it is not the difference between £1.6 million and £200,000. It would be one hell of a difference because it would represent a revolution in thinking. For example, will we say that we want to change the whole thing, the structure, for instance, of our well-staffed and highly dedicated civil service and say that it is rather curious that the pattern of promotion within that civil service consists of moving back, up and away from access to the public? Very often it is the most inexperienced people who get to pull the shutters to deal with the public.
Do we want to change all that — change, for example, the question that it should be an offence under law for a public representative to say to anybody in need that he has got him a particular benefit? If a person could present an affidavit to say that a representative said to him, "I got you the pension", that should be an offence by the public representative. Do we want to change that? That would not cost money but it would mean changing attitudes if it meant looking at our fellow citizens as equals. As long as we refuse to recognise that we will not do anything about poverty.
I should like to respond to the theory that the previous programme was narrow and that this new agency will be wide and generous in its terms of reference. Every facet of participation in society could have been covered if the existing agency had been allowed to succeed. It would be inappropriate of me if I did not pay tribute to fine people like Sister Stanislaus Kennedy who put work into the previous pilot project and who were willing to serve in that agency. I hope the work and commitment of Sister Stanislaus will be recognised by the people in charge of administering the new programme.
That previous programme was wide and generous. I hope that the philosophy that will inform the new agency will take some account of the wider perspectives, the wider aspects of poverty and that it will not become something like an accounting agency for the poor, something whereby we will say at the end of the year "last year they got this; this year they got that; next year they will get a little more". As long as we think like that it is our own minds that will be poor and it is not the poor who will suffer but ourselves and our political system.
