Bhí mé ag caint cheana ar an bhfadhb seo, bochtanas, ag deireadh Mí Márta agus tá an chosúlacht ar an scéal go bhfuil níos lú daoine fós a bhfuil aon tsuim acu san bhfadhb seo an mhí seo ná mar a bhí ag deireadh Mí Márta. Ach, faraoir, caithfimid leanúint ar aghaidh.
It is the intention of the Labour Party to seek to amend this Bill and particularly sections 4 and 18. Section 4 deals with the terms of reference, and the main purport of our amendment will be to restore the concept of inequality to the terms of reference, and to seek to re-order those terms in a way which will enable the Bill which will emerge from our discussions to approach the problem of inequality and its derived consequence of poverty in its many forms.
Section 18 to which our second substantial amendment will be proposed deals with the National Social Services Board. It is the opinion of our party that a case has not been made for the transfer of the functions of this board to the new agency as outlined in the Minister's speech. We will be tabling a number of other amendments to improve the Bill in terms of definition. These will become apparent as the debate on the next Stage develops.
I was disappointed that when we discussed poverty at the end of March we had a very sparse attendance in this House. Obviously the problem was not attracting the interest of Deputies through the months of April and May and into the month of June. In a way, it is interesting, symptomatic an illustrative of our approach in the legislature to the question of poverty that, by and large, we are a privileged assembly of people. I am not suggesting for a second that one needs to be among the ranks of the most abject poor to have an interest in poverty. That in the experience of the Webbs, of Charles Booth and of Shaw himself would contradict such a suggestion. Nevertheless I think that our distance as legislators from the experience and facts of poverty informs the structure of the legislative response.
I find it incredible that one could sit here and listen to a debate yet again on the subject of poverty and the entirety of the Minister's speech and not hear any reference to inequality. I worry about this because if you trace the logic of the missing reference to inequality it leads you to poverty as some kind of pathology. In an intervention the Minister referred to the problem of drugs being under the Department of Health as would be this new agency. It would be a separate statutory body but it was being introduced by the Department of Health. I worry about the overall suggestion that poverty is in fact pathological. This is a very short distance from suggesting that the poor are poor because of some inherent characteristics in themselves as opposed to an approach towards poverty that would see it as an aspect of structure, a structure that confers privilege on the one hand and poverty on the other within the same society, one as neat function of the other.
There is a brilliant exposition of this published by a young anthropologist some years ago, Hugh Brody, in his book Inishkillane. In that book he draws a distinction between, on the one hand, a man in rural poverty and loneliness who comes out with the remark, “I will be like Sonny Liston; I will be dead for weeks before anybody finds me.” While in the same village with him is a character presented under the name Michael, another cameo, who ownes the local petrol pump, the undertaking business, his wife has a guesthouse and he is renting land. The lonely man wishes to sell his land so that he will have neighbours and can provide them with vegetables and so on. But he is stopped by the greedy person in the community who insists on renting the land from him. We can see that the abject loneliness and poverty of the one man are functions of the greed and avarice of the other.
That kind of connection, powerfully demonstrated in all of the scholarship in every country where poverty has been studied is being abandoned in the preparation of a Bill like this. The suggestion is that those who are privileged and well off, comfortable and happy and participating in the community, will be able to set up a structure, able to extend their own efforts to take account of the real interests of those who are the casualties of the very values that the people in the community hold. This is not a very radical suggestion. It is a simple, substantiated research finding in every place in every country where people have studied poverty.
I find it curious that there is reference in the Bill to research. It says under (g) in the Explanatory Memorandum that the agency will be able to draw on and evaluate research on self help, poverty and social deprivation by third level educational and other bodies and to promote such research from time to time on specific projects. If that is the intention of this legislation why not take account of what studies are available at present? There is a consensus in poverty studies among any bodies who have done any research on the subject that what is needed is an approach towards the manifestations of poverty along the dimension of inequality. If one does not do this, if one believes that you should leave structures intact you should take out poverty everywhere you speak of it and you should say this Bill is for the elimination of social distress. That would be more honest. You would be saying that the existing structure is fine; we are hoping that people will be voluntarily concerned about the consequences of the existing structure so as to take into account those poor infortunate people who are in distress. That would be honest but this instrument will not address itself to the problem of poverty, as studied and researched and reported on as an aspect of structure. It will not address itself to the question of distribution of power, the holding of power by those who are privileged and wealthy, the manner in which society reproduces itself and transfers resources unequally to those who unequally possess them at present.
In a sad way we are repeating the history of poverty studies. This exercise is the Irish version of what happened in the United States. I was a post-graduate student there shortly after the initiation of Johnson's war on poverty. It led to the giving of some federal money to poor areas where you had minorities, not poor by any accidental reason but because they were black. They were deprived because they were both black and poor. Some of the money led towards the stirring of demands, not for compassion or consideration but for civil rights. More close to the bone the stirrings in the black ghettos meant that the mayors in the different cities, in Boston and Chicago for example, were threatened in their little local patronage games by the new rights-demanding black poor. The programme came to an end. Representations were made to federal government to pull back and suddenly there was an intellectual response which was interesting — we spent all the money on the blacks but they made love differently and talk to their children differently; the mother in the family had a different influence from the mother in the white family. The next stage was to suggest that no matter what you spent on the black poor they had a culture of their own which would also make them poor. The last stage of the Pontius Pilate exercise was to say, "We must encourage them to participate more in the white man's US world." Poverty was over. Fortune magazine had announced in 1964, “There are no poor Americans.” Early in 1965 the American administration discovered a couple of million of them and it initiated what has been called the rediscovery of the poor in the US. They established a programme. The programme worked and attempted to do certain things; it ran head on into the power structure of American society and it was abandoned.
This exercise in history is being repeated in Ireland. The basis of my assertion is the following: in 1970 Séamus Ó Cinnéide published his book, A Law For The Poor which detailed the experience of those dependent on social welfare. It made an attempt for the first time ever to establish a poverty line in Ireland, so as to begin the estimate of the number of the poor in Ireland. It was followed by the 1971 conference in Kilkenny, the poverty conference at which everybody spoke who had been working with the poor, organised by the late Bishop Birch. This was in turn followed by an all-day conference of the Economic and Social Research Institute, Poverty in Ireland: Research Priorities broadsheet No. 7, October 1972.
A second conference was held in Kilkenny in 1974 to review progress made since 1973. Much later there had been a major policy document published by the Labour Party in 1974. After that schemes were established which became known and ended as the pilot schemes on combating poverty in Ireland. These were abandoned and here the force of my parallel becomes clear. They were abandoned because they were opposed by certain vested interests in our society, the privileged and those who held power.
Some of the activities of the committee, as I explained in my speech of 31 March, were criticised by bishops, politicians and by regular members of the State. Out went poverty exactly the same as in the United States. The poor had been found in 1971, they did not make it as far as 1980. In 1981 we had a tenth anniversary conference in Kilkenny which was characterised by another interesting aspect of our society which revealed the complete intellectual collapse of Irish social science. One part of the seminar would hear from an economist who told us that we were all in a desperate state, we had no money to distribute and so on, that we must all live more abstemiously. Then a social worker would be brought on giving us a biography of a poor person or a case history of a poor family. There might even be two of those because the emphasis was on compassion. Then it would be time to have an economist again to remind you that you really could do nothing. We had this schizophrenic presentation of the social sciences in Kilkenny in 1981.
All this is relevant because it reveals a lack of capacity to be sincere or thorough in our approach to the problems of poverty. I challenge denial on this matter. I think we have done exactly as they did in the United States — forget the poor, rediscover the poor, initiate the programme, abandon the programme, make assertions about the poor and then go on to something else. We are going on to something else in this Bill. Will we be having a definition of what constitutes self help? Is the suggestion that there are some principles which are governable by the individuals themselves, by their own choices, by decisions that they can take unaided which will release them into the possibility of full participation in society? If this is so, it is hard to see the distance between that and something that is mentioned in the Minister's speech when he said he was leaving aside any questions of laissez faire. Of course the point is made — and I do not want to distort what the Minister said — that there will be some assistance available and that people will not be consigned entirely to helping themselves. I see in the concept of self help a residual notion that derives from a case approach towards understanding and trying to do something about poverty.
Another concept that occurs several times throughout the Bill is community development. I must make a confession here that I am nearly 20 years teaching sociology and I have never understood quite what people meant when they spoke about feelings of community. It is one of the most imprecise concepts in sociology, now abandoned by most serious sociological theorists as being so vague as not to have any great theoretical utility. But when you add on to it that other shaky term "development" and you have this new concept of community development, which occurs again and again throughout this measure, I find it very difficult to understand how you can say that you can pursue the theme of poverty, try to discover structures within communities, try to address the question of unequal inequality in all its aspects and take a concept like community development. The idea is that a proportion of the population has moved on to set up an institutional matrix in which people participate and that other people can be brought along to participate in that. But the very structure of the institutions of the privileged are creating the poverty of the less privileged. The very nature of poverty is derived from the excessive possessions of the wealthy, the failure of the attitudes towards poorer people. It is they who define the distance of the rich and that cannot be handled within a model of community development. Perhaps we are going to make history theoretically in this country, that we are going to do something which has never been accomplished in the recorded world. I will give some evidence about communities. People who go on ship cruises refer to themselves as a community. People who oppose itinerants refer to themselves as a community. The European economic partners refer to themselves as a community when they want to discuss economics. That is what I meant by saying that the term "community" is vague and its vagueness will establish a distance between the reality of poverty and the measures that are necessary to eliminate its source — inequality.
Deputy Eileen Desmond, in introducing the attitude of response of our party towards this Bill, made a number of points which are important and to which I will return. There are attitudes here — present even in the debates of this House — which more or less suggest that nobody is poor in Ireland any more. I have heard this statement made. Deputy Desmond referred to a survey carried out by the European Economic Community in March 1977. Only 19 per cent of those interviewed in Ireland felt that poverty was due to injustice within society, whereas 30 per cent felt it was due to laziness. A further 25 per cent believed it was due to misfortune. Although these views were expressed by a small random sample of the population, they do represent the current views of Irish people. They pose a very serious challenge to anyone attempting to find long-term solutions to the problem of poverty. We are in possession of a set of attitudes towards poverty in Ireland which seems to betray a certain amount of compassion towards the extremities of social distress, that part of poverty which we can say is acute social distress. A cynic would suggest that, if the very worst sections of the poor would stay away from the streets, there would be less attention paid to them and it would ease the consciences of some people. I summarised these attitudes when I spoke on 31 March in this House. I said these attitudes revealed that we were pretty high on compassion but low on justice. Will this Bill attack this set of attitudes? Will it go beyond the point of compassion to suggest that justice demands that we make progress along the theme of equality or will it contribute to the smugness of those who are benefiting from inequality? Will it simply encourage them to go beyond compassion in terms of donations and ask that, instead of giving an increment of money, to give an increment of time in dealing with the poor? Will it leave the distance between the privileged and the poor intact? I would love to be wrong in this matter. However, I see nothing in the Bill which will challenge that set of attitudes.
To take up the point behind these attitudes about poverty, at least those people who are offering this opinion as to why there is poverty in Ireland represent considerable progress on those who believe there are no poor at all. That attitude is also prevalent. It has been suggested again and again that the State cannot afford all these spongers that exist, these people who insist on presenting themselves for benefit.
I pose another question. Does our attitude express concern about matters such as food, shelter, access to education, health and is this to be defined in terms of what we can afford to spend or are we to say that the existence of these needs among an expanding population means that we have to question the structure of society, of the institutions, to see if we can provide for this population in an adequate matter? I am afraid we continue to evade these questions. It would not be relevant in a discussion on this Bill to talk about the manner in which we have evaded the problem of unemployment and homelessness. I am not making this point in a partisan way, but I do not think we have any conception of the scale of housing needs or unemployment.
Equally, we are avoiding the reality of poverty. At a political level I am not surprised that the poor are not represented in this House except marginally. One would not expect from the people who now hold power in Ireland a commitment to remove poverty in a structural way, changing the institutions, changing the Constitution if necessary. It is interesting that nobody is rushing to change the Constitution on behalf of the poor. On behalf of whom are we rushing to change the Constitution, and do they represent a vulnerable minority or majority, whatever they are, within our community?
Therefore, the powerless can look with very little hope to an institution such as this. Indeed, it is interesting that rather than these institutions being the resource of the poor and the powerless, something to which they might look to change their position, the poor in fact have become the resource of the politicians. They were the resource of politicians when the State began. People took poor housing here and we had the poor, the potential emigrants, and we were going to do something for all of them. They were the backs upon which conservative politicians in the early days climbed to power in the Irish Republic.
Equally, today within the constituency system, for Deputies and Senators the poor are the clients of brokers within a client political system. They are the people whose poverty can be kept separate, discreet and private, so that they are broken up and so that the homeless will never stand shoulder to shoulder, or the unemployed stand shoulder to shoulder, or those who are dissatisfied with the operations of the State stand shoulder to shoulder: they are all being given individual prescriptions from their political saints, and these political prescriptions, if I might mix metaphors, manage to defuse the impact and effect of poverty in society.
This is not accidental. As I have said, the poor cannot look to the institutions that refuse to look with any confidence at structures and the relationship of economic institutions to jobs. On the other hand, these problems generate the fodder for conservative politics. In saying that, I wish to draw attention to something else. Let us not argue about the precise nature of the figures. Many people have spent a great deal of time and effort asking whether Séamus O' Cinnéide's figures were accurate — if he had drawn the line differently would he have got different numbers of people above or below the line? The fact is that by taking simple social welfare criteria he was able to show that we would probably have one child in five, one household in four, below the poverty line in the seventies. Arguments about precise volume are irrelevant.
It is 11 years after the 1971 Kilkenny Conference. Have we changed the attitudes of the privileged and the powerful towards the poor and the powerless? Have we changed the realities of poverty? Have we changed the prospects for the children of the poor? Have we changed objectives in relation to the proportion? Have we changed attitudes, institutions and structures? We will be able to say historically that institutionally we responded by setting up programmes that were experimental, later to lead to a systematic attack on inequality in its various forms, but we abandoned the effort. We looked back on those people, who have time and kind compassionate natures, to look after the poor. We decided we would invite them to extend their concern. The Bill proposed to achieve this transition uses phrases like `community development', `self-help' and `social deprivation'. Not once does it use words such as `inequality', thereby avoiding structures, and therefore it leaves the privileged happy.
I will refer to another myth which I did not have the opportunity to do when we were proposing here the establishment of any effective agency which would have taken the place of this proposed one if my party had any influence on the position. The explanatory memorandum with the Bill refers less than public discussion to poverty. It is sometimes assumed that we are dealing with a section of the population who are poor and about whom something can be done. The evidence contradicts this: the poor are not one component section of the population. Poverty is something that happens in the course of a lifetime. People are not poor only at a certain stage of their lives: they move into poverty when there is the greatest strain on an inadequate income, when there is inadequate housing, and they move out of poverty when their children have dispersed. It is a stage of the life cycle. Incidentally, we knew that in 1893 when the British studied poverty. This was brought to our attention in the late seventies by Professor Damian Hannan of the ESRI in a fine study on life cycle and poverty.
There is the question of whether a voluntary agency can be assisted to help the poor. I want to say positively why I worry about this and why I believe it cannot be done. The experience of poverty in a typical household — hundreds of social workers can tell us this — may begin by the unemployment of the principal breadwinner. It may become complicated immediately thereafter by the fact that the people are in rented accommodation and this leads to the creation of a housing problem. In relation to food, nutrition, choices have to be made. It affects the nutrition of children. Children, badly fed and clothed, will participate less in the school system. Over-crowding can lead to devalued relationships between children and parents and children will escape to the streets. Suddenly, they are in trouble with the law.
In every aspect of the State services — employment, housing, education, justice and health — there is proven evidence of the difference in experience between those who are poor and unemployed and those who do not share these characteristics. Bear in mind the poverty related to unemployment. Is it a great mark of sophistication in our Republic to see the unemployed queueing at employment exchanges, waiting to be interviewed at hatches and have their number called or to see those without houses being told by the most junior members of the public service that there is nothing for them? We have a unique feature in our public service —it is a kind one basically — where older people are promoted. They go upstairs and away from the public. The poor find themselves being treated dismissively.
As regards education, I teach in an institution where a tiny proportion of the children of working class families participate. Those of us who have participated in institutions which have benefited from public money must continually bear in mind that we were supported by the taxes of those who are now disenfranchised. Will this Bill give greater hope to those who are unemployed in their dealings with the State? To give an example, when one is buying a house speculatively one sits down in an open plan office with the person who is selling the house. One is treated with great courtesy even though one's needs may not be involved but merely one's idle curiosity. Compare that with one who has his or her prospects completely shattered by unemployment. They will be treated in dreary, drab places. Successive Governments have failed to do anything about this. All it needs is a few coats of paint, demolish the hatches and break down the barriers between the people administering the dole and those receiving it. Even if we never accept our full responsibility to explain to people why they cannot be housed or have shelter given to them, we should not ask them to queue with go-cars and keep their children waiting while their files are opened and different bits of bureaucracy are related to them sometimes courteously and sometimes not.
Bills such as this one give the idea that the structure of society is a good one which will serve us and can be made by us to serve the poor. I question that and categorically deny it. This State was founded with the rhetoric of concern for the poor. Many people who served in this House in the early days could speak about a Dublin which had the worst tenements in Europe and child illnesses which were higher than any other city in Europe. They were moved to do something about poverty. Today we have taken a version of our society and have put it into our heads as the only known world that might ever be. It finds itself in Bills like this. It is comforting to the privileged society and those who have. It is cold to the poor, the powerless, the homeless and the unemployed.
In relation to other aspects of the experience of the poor in our society which will not be helped by a Bill like this, we have two health systems. We have one which is suitable for poor people but can be avoided by those who do not need to depend on it. The second version is the private health system which is private only in relation to the remuneration funded by the public and tax-payers and to the income it generates. The poor suffer a great deal of bewilderment in relation to their illnesses. In relation to the areas where there is poverty I ask myself will there be more confidence and a breakdown of dependency? Instead of seeing physical illness as one part of a chain of deprivation, will they break out of it? I am not so confident that they will.
What we have to put up with in relation to the administration of justice is a scandal. If being poor means one is badly housed, participates unequally in education, is unemployed and has a diminished social environment one is socially deprived. Does one find the system of justice operating to reduce the distance between the people coming before it and their children or does one see the opposite? Does one see those who are privileged to be sitting in judgment on the poor seeking to understand them and the distance between them and the people coming before them? Does one hear them giving homilies and lectures as if poverty was something one had chosen? I do not believe the existing society is a perfect ensemble of attitudes, beliefs and models of the world and it is only a matter of its concern being extended like a shadow to take over those less fortunate. We create the less fortunate by refusing to plan the economy, by refusing to deal with financial institutions and by refusing to structure housing to provide shelter; in education, by not getting rid of the daft notion that everyone must participate before the age of 20, by not committing ourselves to continuing education, by not heading off the troubles of the young among the poor before they get to the judgment part of the justice system and by not looking at our health system and saying that it exists to care for the ill and not to prop up privilege and incomes which should be a scandal in any civilised society.
If we do not accept the responsibility of looking at our society critically in terms of structure we will refuse to face up to the problem of equality. If one leaves that, one finds oneself speaking about community care, community development and extension of services to encompass the poor. It is a poor alternative but it is better than lack of concern. It would be welcomed by me and by others. It does not address the question of poverty. It is easy to say that if the poor are not responding they have some pathological trait which diminishes their capacity to participate equally in society. In our motion at the end of March, which would have led to legislation, we wanted to decrease dependency and give confidence to people to see themselves in the State not as people who have any defect but as participants in society as equal citizens.
