War on empty-nesters shows State’s hypocrisy

NOT so long ago Michelle Obama posted her usual cutesy wedding anniversary message to Barack, thanking him for their great life, and for the next chapter of, as she put it ‘becoming empty nesters and discovering what is next’. One could sense Michelle’s anticipation after waving off her younger daughter to college and concluding her time as a hands-on mother.

In America, becoming empty nesters is part of the circle of life, a joyful prelude perhaps to downsizing which, for all the force of its emotional wrench, can also be a positive process, allowing people to cut down on bills or free up cash for new interests.

In this country though, where getting older means roughly the same as getting old and comes with catastrophic consequences for everything from the economy to the health system, the term empty nesters conjures up nothing but disdain.

It’s a stick to beat older people with, along with other insidious labels from bed-blockers to downsizers, creating the stereotype of older people as a massive drain on society and an unjust bulwark to the dreams and desires of the young and dynamic, ergo superior, part of the population.

The working out of the housing crisis has provided the latest platform whereby ageist attitudes and prejudices have been given full vent.

PUBLIC policy is polluted with disgusting attitudes towards the over55s. When it comes to housing stock, they fall firmly into the elderly bracket but not, coincidentally, when the State pension is concerned. The extent of these attitudes is reflected in Housing Minister Eoghan Murphy’s research into whether a new bedroom tax would ‘encourage’ empty nesters to downsize and free up their family home for the younger generation.

Murphy must have wondered who his political allies were when, sensing the ire of the grey lobby, the Taoiseach decried the proposed new levy as a ‘terrible idea’.

‘I have parents in their seventies and eighties and yes, they have spare room, but that’s their home, the home they have lived in for 30 to 40 years and there are examples like that all over the country,’ said Leo, echoing popular sentiment.

Of course, the Taoiseach has form for saying one thing while his Government’s policies reflect the complete opposite.

As health minister, he blamed the trolley crisis on ‘bed blockers’, the elderly who have recovered from illness but can’t be discharged without a home care package or a nursing home place.

To be fair, he announced a €25m war-chest to tackle the crisis but he said nothing to dissipate the stigma surrounding older people who, owing to their dependence on the State’s patchy services, often seem to be viewed inimically as having outstayed their welcome on earth.

At the Labour party’s conference, a proposal to challenge the introduction of a higher pension age than other European countries was widely dismissed as a cynical vote-buying exercise that ignored the so-called ‘pension timebomb’. The idea that with the population living longer and healthily as opposed to dropping dead at 70 in the public interest, the pension age should be set at 67, or better still beyond, seems to have gained acceptance.

INDIVIDUALS who have spent more than 40 years in the workforce and paid their taxes in the expectation that they could do something else afterwards, seem to have no choice in the matter. Journalist Valerie Cox subverts that idea in her book Growing Up With Ireland.

Her interviewees are still thriving and some are in the workforce right into their tenth decade. It proves, she claims, how our perception of older people is so negative and blind to their enormous workload, caring for even older parents and being productive in other ways.

A lifelong broadcaster, Cox embodies the notion of the Third Age, the fully engaged golden years of adulthood rather than the myth of the feeble granny figure nodding off in the corner.

On her retirement, she won an age discrimination case against RTÉ and volunteered in the refugee camps. Cox shows that the choice facing retirees is not stark, between remaining in their career or putting their feet up at home.

And that, in the end, it’s not the over 65s who are stale, spent and past their sell-by-date, but the policies who have not kept pace with their changing demographic.