They may not be poor, but they’ve lost their lives
Joan Burton is right to acknowledge the ‘squeezed middle’ who have had to put everything on hold, writes Brendan O’connor
JOAN Burton’s outbursts over the last fortnight have been interesting and surprising. Because these days you don’t really expect a politician to have a feel for what’s going on in people’s lives. We have become used to this Government having a tin ear when it comes to the vibe on the street. For example, it took Enda Kenny two weeks to work up his tears for the Magdalene Laundry women, and that was only after the major PR cock-up of his failure to apologise in the first place.
In the wake of the deal that wasn’t a deal, Joan Burton was one of the few politicians to stand over what Michael Noonan and Enda Kenny explicitly said on the announcement of the deal regarding easier budgets. Burton made the entirely reasonable suggestion that there were limits to the effectiveness of austerity, that the IMF had admitted this, and that the prom-note premium should be put back into the economy to invest in some jobs and some growth.
Her comments were portrayed as “irresponsible” by her critics, and some of her enemies even seemed to spin to papers that it was Burton’s comments that caused the ECB to look afresh at the deal and question it. Even though Burton was saying nothing that Enda and Noonan hadn’t said in the heat of the moment. But she had committed the cardinal sin of being uppity and upsetting Europe. That’s not our strategy of course. Our strategy is to be good.
Burton proved again last week why she is the Miriam O’Callaghan of politics, someone who seems to have a feel for, and an empathy with, people and their lives, someone who, even though she is in a profession that is not routinely loved, manages to enjoy a consistent level of personal popularity.
Following the release of the report of the expert group on child benefit, which recommended that only those earning less than 25 grand should get the full whack of child benefit payments, Joan Burton sounded not only a note of caution, she did something very brave: she stood up for people on relatively high incomes. It is easy for politicians to stand up for the poor these days, always an uncontroversial stance, but politicians rarely stand up for those on higher incomes.
The main thrust of the criticism of the suggested changes to child benefit was that it would affect people on low incomes. Indeed, that is the fashionable stance to take on everything now. And while it is only fair to some extent that we should be concerned for the poor first and foremost, I read an interesting quote from former New York mayor Ed Koch recently. Talking about cutbacks he had to make in New York, he said: “The people who had to sacrifice the most were the poorest. Because that's where the city budget goes.
“Two-thirds of the budget. All the left-wingers, the ‘Village Voice' people, yelled, ‘He's balancing the budget on the backs of the poor!' And I said, ‘Who do we spend the budget on?'“
Burton had the guts to stand up for the not-so-poor last week in her response to the report on child benefit: “One of the big issues for me would be the fact that we’ve a lot of families with parents in the 35-58 age group who bought property. . . at the height of the boom,” she said. “They have high mortgages and high outgoings. They may have quite high income but the child benefit in cash is important to them.”
There aren’t many people out there who will have huge sympathy for youngish to middle-aged people who have quite high incomes. Let’s face it; who is going to fight to the death for their right to retain their handouts from the State? But in fact, Burton is identifying here a demographic that is as troubled
‘Joan Burton proved again last week why she is the Miriam O’Callaghan of politics’
in its own way as the poor. Burton is identifying a particular generation here who have borne the brunt of the bust. This is the real squeezed middle in a way.
For starters, this is a generation who will never enjoy the kind of retirement enjoyed by the generation before them. The baby boomers have largely shuffled off now in great health, many of them managing to retire well before 65, lots of them getting away with all kinds of creative “packages”. Lots of them sold houses to younger people at what we now think are extortionate prices. They will enjoy fine, guaranteed pensions for longer than people were ever expected to draw down pensions. They are, in many ways, the golden generation. They slipped in after the wars were fought but before capitalism ate itself, in a window of prosperity and hope, golden handshakes and gilt-edged futures.
The people Joan Burton is talking about, the post baby boomers, generation X or Y or whatever, have little, if anything, by way of a pension. Many of them are contract or freelance workers who never experienced the solid job-for-life-with-pension enjoyed by the baby boomers. Roughly half of Irish workers now don’t have a pension. Even those who did have steady, permanent jobs are likely to find that their company’s pension pot is in severe difficulty, given that more than four in five pension schemes here are in deficit. Just like here at INM, whatever they were promised can’t be given to them anymore.
Those who had their own pensions aren’t much better off. Some of them invested in their future by buying property or bank shares. In a nationwide survey at the end of last year, Friends First found that 10 per cent of people have stopped contributing to their pensions completely because they can’t afford to, and one in five has cut back on how much they can put in.
The Government has also been doing its best to screw people’s pension savings through a straightforward raid on pensions to shore up the national coffers, and through getting rid of various allowances. Of course the State is not going to be able to step in and give this generation a pension either. The pension shortfall faced by the State has been estimated at a third of a trillion euro.
This is also a generation which will be stuck for life with so-called legacy debt. Hard as it is to believe, the ones who come behind them will be much better off. They will buy property for a third to a half of what the ones in the middle paid. Neither will the ones coming up now be burdened by crazy boomtime debt. They will have an income that is commensurate with their outgoings, as against trying to service boom-time legacy debt with the wages of austerity.
The people Burton is talking about may be on relatively high incomes, but many of them are postponing life while they wait for things, or for their lives, to “settle down”. They wait and they wait for the uncertainty to recede, to be able to make some plans, to be able to think of moving on. They agonise over having the first child, the second one. The third is regarded as madness, the fourth a catastrophe. They wait and wait for their lives to begin again, all the time reminded that they are not as young as they were and the best days of their lives are being eaten up by this never-ending downturn, while they wait to live the life they thought they were promised if they got an education and worked hard.
They are the ones Joan Burton had the guts to stand up for last week. And they won’t forget that. Because no one stands up for them. And if we can ever harness those people and their energy and their determination and if we can unleash their potential again, they will get over the fact that all the promises the world made them have been broken, and they will build the new Ireland.