Bad things happen all the time, but it’s time to blow whistle on blame game
Acceptance, preparation and — no matter how unpopular — personal responsibility are key, writes Conor Skehan
DESPITE our generally temperate climate, Ireland has a long history of occasionally extreme weather, as shown by ancient monastic records from nearly 1,500 years ago.
From official scientific records, most of Ireland’s greatest weather extremes for heat and cold date from the 1880s, as well as the long droughts that occurred between 1800 and 1809 and again between 1854 and 1860.
In 1802, one of Dublin’s worst floods was recorded as washing away Ormond Bridge and flooding most of the city centre, with up to three metres of water reported in Castle Yard and Patrick Street.
And these are just the reliable records from the ‘scientific era’ — unlike the ancient extremes of AD695 and AD822 when the seas between Ireland and Scotland froze so hard people walked from coast to coast, or the wet and cold of 1740 that led to a famine that killed up to 20pc of the population, or the Great Drought of 1826.
So it takes no prophesy to be able to state that this winter, or next, there will be a storm, a freeze, a drought or a flood that will be severe and intense, yet local in effect, as they have always been.
Nonetheless, it will become headline news as a harbinger of great and threatening change. Media reports will include photographs of miserable families. Gloomy commentators will warn that this latest catastrophe is just the beginning of the end.
There will be calls for the Government to ‘do something’ for the individuals and their communities. There will be threats of future ruin unless we follow the prescriptions of some populist. Less dramatically, there will also be insurance claims to help clean up and repair.
In the middle of our current debate about how to address our ‘compensation culture’ we must not lose sight of the value and importance of insurance. It plays a critical role in protecting us all by spreading risk so that everyone pays a little, to pay a lot to those unlucky enough to need it.
There is also a ‘but’ that we all need to remember. There is an assumption, frequently overlooked, that underlies all insurance, namely that everyone should try to exercise the reasonable care and common sense necessary to avoid putting themselves in harm’s way.
This concept of personal responsibility seems to be eroding rapidly in our world where the new and untested ideas of social justice and identity politics are rapidly deepening and widening fractures in society — creating unsustainable expectations of entitlement together with an ever-growing sense of ‘us versus them’.
Personal responsibility is becoming an increasingly unpopular concept in a world where ‘they’ should always be doing something for ‘us’. In these circumstances, we in Ireland seem to be drifting towards a widely held belief that someone, somewhere should be held accountable for every misfortune. Everyone, that is, except the victim themselves.
‘Victim-shaming’ is a term that has its origins in sexual assault cases in which the victim is blamed for being attacked. This blame can be attributed to what they wore, their history, their consumption of alcohol or drugs, or even being in the wrong place. Clearly, this is a disgrace, because it attempts to transfer responsibility away from the person who is the attacker.
However, the language from this reprehensible practice is beginning to migrate, nowhere more than in relation to natural disasters, where the ‘attacker’ is nature. We forget at our peril that storms, floods, droughts and freezes are all impersonal natural events that have happened since time began. They only become disasters when people get in their way.
All over the world people are putting themselves in harm’s way by moving, in large numbers, to places that are well-known to be prone to natural hazards.
In places as separate as Florida in the United States, Mumbai in India, Jakarta in Indonesia as well as huge coastal plains and river estuaries all over Asia, there are countless people now living in places that were formerly shunned because of their exposure to flood or storm. The reasons vary from place to place but the outcome is always the same, when unstoppable natural forces meet fragile human structures.
To address this, global agencies practice Disaster Risk Reduction — usually described as DRR. It has proved to be a successful idea, based on encouraging more thoughtful planning of land-uses and emergency preparation.
More and more often now, the news headlines are likely to read “Millions evacuated ahead of cyclone”, where only 50 years ago the headline would read “Cyclone kills 500,000”, as happened after the 1970 cyclone in Pakistan and India.
The successful implementation of Disaster Risk Reduction requires very high levels of sensitivity and tact. Advising someone that their choice of home has placed them at deadly risk can be very difficult, especially when they are poor and short of choices. It can also be difficult to overcome herd-like behaviour — when everyone else is making the same unwise choice — as is happening along much of the hurricane-prone low-lying areas of the south-east of the US.
Post-disaster is never the right time to discuss smarter choices. “The night of the hurricane was just the start of our disaster” is a common quote among affected communities, where recovery can take a generation.
As winter begins again, but before the worst of the weather is upon us, the time may be right to start to think about how to reach a balance between having the compassion to care for those already affected by natural disasters and the courage to confront those who would rather ignore reality by knowingly putting themselves in harm’s way.
In the UK there is growing outrage and calls for reform, in the aftermath of flooding in Yorkshire, about the refusal to offer flood insurance for houses built after 2009 in flood-prone areas. The insurers point out that official Flood Risk Assessments were carried out, published and were widely available from that time onwards.
Meanwhile, back in Ireland, The Economist magazine last week described Ireland as having “an epidemic of dubious compensation claims, extravagant awards and soaring insurance premiums that is blighting small businesses, forcing drivers off the road and stifling public activities, including local festivals”.
This unflattering analysis suggests that insurance in Ireland may also need serious reform.
Any debate about how to deal with this issue will need to look beyond the usual suspects, the lawyers, the insurers and the compensationseekers. We, as a society, will need to change attitudes to the blame game and accept that each of us will need to do more to cultivate and accept the role of personal responsibility when trying to deal with adversity.
Challenging the picture of the world as a place divided into guilty attackers and blameless victims will not be easy.
The creation and heroic elevation of new classes of victims seems to increasingly be invoked, when trying to persuade us that existing systems, run by the guilty, need to be overthrown.
Such a change will undoubtedly challenge many populists for whom the blame game has become a staple. In their version of the future only the blameless can lead.
‘Post-disaster is never the right time to discuss smarter choices’