The poverty truth
by Keith Harris
December 1, 2002One national journalist once referred to the Irish Government as the “vagabonds who squandered the boom years” [Irish Examiner Sat 30 Nov 2002].
The comment was made in an article looking at how one month Ireland faced its toughest budget in a decade despite one year previously being poised at the top of the candy cake, having reaped huge benefits from a burgeoning economy. Try telling the people that in just one short year from leading the European economies Ireland had sunk to the bottom of the peat bog so drastically that the same journalist said the country had become the laughing stock of Europe. In short, there is something quite not right here.
Most journalists can be said to be decent, honest folk but many will soliloquise on the ‘truth’ and much is made by the press of those living in ‘poverty’.
Yet there is an irreconcilable difference between living in and merely observing poverty. Those who come from an impoverished or very poor background stand little chance of entering the halls of journalism through schools of journalism or by working up through the ranks. Indeed, the latter course is almost non-existent today. The exception is rare.
The outcome is that most journalists who write about poverty simply have never really known it. They have not known what it is really like to not be able to afford a new pair of shoes except perhaps from a thrift shop; they have not known what it really means to daily make sacrifices of the things better off people simply take for granted.
The majority of single, unemployed people in Ireland and those in receipt of welfare allowances live in daily poverty, despite claims to the contrary. The Government has set a goal of reaching the EU social welfare target of €150 per week by the 2005—however the EU target of €150 was for the year 2002. The average current weekly income for the unemployed or welfare assisted stands at between €115 and €130—equivalent to from €16.5 to €18.5 daily.
These figures must be viewed against the fact that Ireland has one of the highest VAT rates in the EU, set at 21 per cent, and general insurance and property costs have soared to the point where they are prohibitive to the average citizen.
The majority of people not living or having experienced living below the poverty line care little for those that are. It is a foreign territory that in their outlook does not concern them although in reality and effect it concerns them a great deal.
Many choose to cloud the reality of the existence of poverty by taking the view that it is primarily the fault of those who are living in poverty that they are poor.
They should do something about it, they say. Would that it were so simple. To be sure, there are some who have been fortunate in escaping the poverty trap but the key words are ‘fortunate’ and ‘some’. Those who deny that the same avenues are not within reach of those living in poverty as they are more readily available to the better off do not understand the reality of poverty.
It is helpful to include here a few widely accepted definitions of poverty:
- poverty:- the state of being poor; need, want of necessities; a lack or deficiency; meagreness or inadequacy;
- poverty line:- the dividing line between incomes that are sufficient, and incomes that are insufficient, to purchase life's necessities
- poverty trap:- a state of poverty from which there is no escape, any increase in income resulting in a diminution or withdrawal of low-income government benefits.
They can be summed up as proclaiming poverty as being without adequate income to provide the necessities of life. Until we fully tackle and begin to eliminate poverty there can be none of the justice and freedom we so readily pay homage to having instilled in our world.
It remains questionable whether poverty can ever be adequately addressed in any society based upon capitalism or financial profits—be that society democratic or communist rooted. Eradication of poverty in a society orientated towards financial profit is an ultimate unification of opposites that would, if pursued to its conclusion, negate the very root drive of such a society, resulting in an El Dorado existence where wealth can be acquired by all and sundry alike.
It is perhaps significant that less than 0.01 per cent of the global population control the world's assets and by far the bulk of the financial profits resulting from their exploitation. We publish bibles of all denomination throughout the world by the millions that all tell us how crass it is to run life around false gods and then we immediately continue to prostitute ourselves to the god of money, as if we were really reading about life on some fictitious world when we read our holy books.
That's jazz, Brother. That's what jazz does. It makes the man selfish. He doesn't give a fuck about his brothers. That's what jazz is doing to Dean, said Joey The Lips.
Roddy Doyle (1958- ) Irish novelist and playwright. The Commitments
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