Biggest ever Budget did little to close the gaping chasm between rich and poor
ONE of my earliest childhood memories was of driving to a factory in Dublin with my father to collect his wages. It was his third attempt to get what he was owed. He parked our bashed-up Ford Cortina next to a shiny new BMW belonging to ‘the boss man’, whose lavish lifestyle was funded by withholding workers’ wages.
Head held high but empty-handed, we drove in silence to a pawn brokers at the back of Henry Street where my father hocked his wedding ring to buy the week’s shopping. On the way out, we passed a homeless man begging on the corner. Putting money in his cardboard cup, my Dad spoke for the first time since leaving Finglas,: “There but for the grace of God, go I.”
In the decades before the Celtic Tiger, the building trade was in recession and in the early 1980s unemployment was at a record high. Jobs for labourers were scarce and exploitation of workers by unscrupulous bosses was rampant. With four mouths to feed, my mother took various jobs, from waitressing in diners to washing dishes in The Bailey restaurant. We got our clothes from charity shops before it was fashionable and my mother didn’t put the fire on until we got in from school to save coal. Fingers sometimes blue from the cold, she struggled to strike the match.
Back then, Ireland was the sick man of Europe, yet passing a homeless person on the street was so rare that it was shocking. Today, despite Ireland being the 14th richest country in the world, 8,702 people are homeless with an increase of 232% in homeless families since 2014 (when monthly records began). Shock has given way to apathy, outrage anaesthetised it seems by our burgeoning wealth.
Last Tuesday night, after Budget 2021 had been unveiled amongst much fanfare, 124 people slept on the streets of Dublin city. It was Nelson Mandela who said: “A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.” That seems like a useful benchmark against which to assess Budget 2021.
The root cause of homelessness is the broken housing system and a shortage of public housing stock. Given that there are more than 70,000 households on the social housing waiting list, and more than 8,000 people living in emergency accommodation, the Budget’s target of 12,250 new social housing units in 2021 seems woefully inadequate.
Additionally, there’s no reinstatement of the eviction ban or mortgage moratorium. The increase in the fuel allowance will not be sufficient to protect low-paid workers from the carbon-tax hike and, for the second year in succession, there’s no increase in primary social welfare payments. This impacts upon sole parents and people with disabilities who already have the highest rates of poverty and deprivation. There were no improvements in income supports for people living in direct provision.
The families around the country already struggling to feed their children, unable to pay heating bills and living in fear of eviction, look set for more of the same.
The 10c increase for minimum wage workers (1pc) – many of whom risk their lives as essential workers – and the failure to restore the Pandemic Unemployment Payment to €350, when compared with the rise in TDs’ salaries by 2pc, to levels not seen since the Celtic Tiger, exposes an almost Orwellian underbelly of inequality.
Some animals, according to Budget 2021, are more equal/worthy than others.
A recent EU report found that the Covid19 pandemic had a disproportionately negative impact on women, who faced greater job losses as well as shouldering the burden of home-schooling and childcare. Given that childcare costs in Ireland are among the highest in Europe, the lack of additional investment into early-years education and after-school care in the Budget exposed the democratic deficit that comes with a dearth of women in Government.
In September, data analysts identified a strong correlation between rates of Covid19 infection and income levels in some areas in Dublin, with Ballymun-Finglas having the highest 14-day incidence rate at the time of publishing. That’s my old neighbourhood so I knew that the stats had nothing to do with house parties and everything to do with low-paid work, cramped, shared accommodation, dependency on public transport and health and education inequality.
Budget 2021 does little to close the gaping chasm between the rich and poor in Ireland, which is bad for society. It does little for the 689,000 people living in poverty, 200,000 of whom are children.
It’s worth remembering that poverty isn’t a lifestyle choice but the product of state-sanctioned structural inequalities. It’s noteworthy, for example, that even in the midst of a pandemic that will hit the poorest hardest, our Government chooses not to intervene in securing the Debenhams strikers’ redundancies, yet fought tooth and nail to prevent Apple from paying €14bn into our dwindling coffers.
My family didn’t consider ourselves to be poor but there were times when life was precarious, where the only thing that stood between us and destitution was good health and luck. My father’s words ring truer in my ear now more than ever. There, but for the grace of God, go any one of us.
Poverty isn’t a lifestyle choice but the product of statesanctioned structural inequalities