No excuse for welching

Welcome to the Hot Press Christmas issue. In keeping with the spirit of the season, it would be nice to be in a position to do a warm, feelgood editorial, wouldn’t it? But with Bush back in office, havoc in Iraq, election rigging in Ukraine, and the rise of Nicolas Sarkozy in France, there’s too much shit going on in the world right now for that. Not least on our own little patch.

This should be a time of the year when we turn our thoughts to those less fortunate than ourselves, right? Love thy neighbour? As thyself? We’re supposed to be good at that in Ireland. So let’s think for a minute about those parts of Africa, where people are living still in feudal conditions, starving, and dying of AIDS. There are, of course, other places in the world in which poverty is widespread and endemic – but Africa is hurting especially badly right now and is in dire need of assistance.
What has our government done for these people in the countdown to Christmas? What has it done for those who were victims of war? What has it done for the world’s poor and brutalised? It has told them that there isn’t as much room at the inn as we had promised, that some of them will have to bugger off and do without. How? The government has blithely reneged on its own commitment – made on behalf of the people of Ireland by the same coalition partners, Fianna Fail and the PDs – that 0.7% of GNP would be allocated to Overseas Development Aid by the year 2007.
It isn’t just the cute hoor meanness of this decision that stinks. It is the arrant hypocrisy of it that’d make your blood boil.
At the UN Summit in Johannesburg in 2002, the Taoiseach, then and now, Bertie Ahern, condemned rich countries for their failure to meet the 0.7% target. He said that it was shameful and indefensible. Well, it is.
So which nations should be ashamed of themselves. The US? Great Britain? Sweden? Germany perhaps? Of course. All of them! The other fellas!
And what about Ireland?
Work it out for yourself. On the one hand, the government are forever proclaiming that Ireland’s economic performance is the envy of the rest of the world. On the other, we still like to pretend that we’re not really ready to be listed in the rich club. Well, fuck it, we can’t have it both ways. By all of the conventional economic criteria, Ireland is a rich country now. We can’t escape it: we are among those that stand condemned – by Bertie Ahern himself.
The excuses that have been trotted out in defence of this betrayal of the world’s poor hold no water. The best one is that our GNP has grown too quickly. You could summarise this rationalisation as follows: “Shit, we never thought that we’d have to give so much.” Except that even this would be a lie. Back in 2000, the Department of Finance forecast that we would be paying 1 billion euro towards overseas development aid in 2007. According to the same department’s current forecasts of GNP, that will indeed represent 0.7% of our GNP in three years time. In other words, if we stuck with the programme, we would be bang on target.
So, reneging on the commitment is all about politics. It is all about keeping the money to buy votes. That, I fear, is the bottom line. To describe it as despicable is to understate it…

On a similarly seasonal note, I was amused at the headline during the week that the Catholic Church, through the Conference of Religious in Ireland – that’s CORI to you – was considering legal action if rezoning decisions to facilitate the building of affordable housing were to affect the value of land held by them.
CORI have some neck. Their representative, Father Sean Healy – a nice man, I have no doubt, and I mean that sincerely – has been lecturing the State on the fact that it has allowed a huge gap to develop between the rich and the poor in Ireland. Fine, as far as it goes. Except that much of this new wealth has been generated through the increase in property values in Ireland over the past twenty years. And what organisation has been the greatest beneficiary of this boom in property prices? Why, the Catholic Church, of course.
The religious orders, as well as the diocese of Dublin, were and are the owners of a vast amount of property, much of it prime development land, in and around the city of Dublin. How they acquired this land, and who paid for it, is an interesting but complicated question that we won’t go into here. However, far less complicated is the fact that a considerable amount of this land has been sold, in recent years, at gargantuan profits. The rest they have held onto, like any other speculator, with a view to seeing if even greater profits can be extracted from disposing of the land in the future.
And have they been gaily handing back the spoils of the property boom to the Government to distribute among the less well off? Does the Pope shit in the woods? He does not. And they have not.
So, I say this. If the Catholic Church is serious about social justice, and if indeed it is serious about propagating the message of Christ, why not make a real gesture towards the poor and the disadvantaged? Put your money where your collective mouth is. Stick 100 million euro into affordable housing, with no strings attached. You can afford it. In fact, make it two hundred while you’re at it. And lay off the threat that you’ll take legal action if any of your land is rezoned in a way that limits the profits to be accumulated from selling it.
It’d make a nice Christmas present to the people in Ireland who really need it...
Finally, did you see the report in The Observer that the British Government knew all about the foiled coup in Equatorial Guinea, which Mark Thatcher has been accused of funding? Equatorial Guinea – which just happens to be an oil rich country. Tony Blair and his gang – now, there’s another bunch of hypocritical bastards.
Take it easy on the drink and have a Happy Christmas…