Trouble in paradise

Watching things come apart is a peculiar and hypnotic experience. Entropy, the tendency to descend into chaos. One day there’s a coherent sweater, next day it snags on a nail and starts to unravel. And once started, it’s hard to stop. You hardly remember the nail. You just get more and more annoyed with the unravelling, the endless snags, the weird and unstoppable process. And there’s nothing you can do.

It must be like that for politicians. Take John O’Donoghue. He did OK by his own lights for five years. He even managed to escape from the Molloy affair more or less intact. But then two young men with nothing much to persuade them otherwise took a car and crashed it into a Garda car in Stillorgan in Dublin. And the flood began to spill over the dam.

It was summed up by Brendan Howlin of the Labour Party, who asked a simple question – do citizens feel safer in their homes and on the streets than they did before the bould O’Donoghue came into office? The answer is no. And everybody has known it for several years. But nobody quite thought about it as simply as that. The point is, that he rampaged through his years in opposition castigating the ineffectual policies being pursued by his opposite number in Fine Gael and shouting for zero tolerance...

The voters may decide that what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

The same kind of question might be asked elsewhere as well. Certainly, the present Irish Government would do well in many spheres. People feel wealthier and more optimistic about the future. That’s for sure. And there’s much more.

But equally, they worry more about their degenerated health service, and the impossibility of buying a house unless you’re uncommonly well set up. Which might not be a bad thing – look at Mediterranean Europe, or Amsterdam. But we don’t have the housing stock or the requisite number of apartments to replicate this European experience.

In the middle of all this, one must single out poverty. One does so for a simple reason – the last six or seven years have been characterised as the Celtic Tiger era, the time when Ireland got rich, earned the right to sup at the highest table. And the figures lend support – the Gross National product is right up there. On a per capita basis we are among the chosen ones. And yet...

For all that, the separation between poor and rich is greater now than ever before. That is an injustice that rankles, that cries for resolution.

Let’s be fair in this. There are less people in absolute poverty than there were before. Fewer are likely to starve, be malnourished or go without the absolute basics. But poverty is now usually measured as a lack of what most people take for granted. What’s happening is this – the rising tide is lifting all boats, but it’s lifting the biggest and richest more than the smallest and poorest. The gap is growing. Let’s look at the figures.

According to the Combat Poverty Agency, the proportion of households living on less than 50% of the average income was 18.6% in 1994, 22.4% in 1997, 24.6% in 1998 and over 25% in 2000. A similar pattern can be seen regarding individuals. So, more people have to live on less than half the average income.

On top of that, the surrender of control of housing and of who gets to live in estates to local residents, often in the form of one of the smaller and more militant, not to say militarist, parties, has meant more and more homeless junkies and thieves on the streets. One understands the frustrations of these residents. But even thieves and junkies have to live somewhere and in the absence of an alternative, they will live on the street. The gap grows ever wider.

Politicians will use many arguments and indicators. They will always seek to put their best foot forward. And one cannot blame them for that. You’d do the same yourself. But these facts speak for themselves. After six or seven years of undreamed of wealth, the rich are richer and the poor are (relatively) poorer. Coupled with the sense that we are less safe on the streets and the fear that getting injured in a Friday night brawl would leave us on a hospital trolley for twenty four hours, not everybody is singing in the streets. And that’s before we mention Campus Stadium Ireland (with which on the whole, by the way, I agree. But I may be in a minority).

Would the opposition have done any better?

That’s impossible to answer. The legacy of the last Rainbow Coalition is far from unsullied. By way of example, there was the decision to introduce free higher education. This was allegedly in pursuit of equal opportunities. But equal opportunities have been shown to be utterly ineffectual in promoting genuine equality. And indeed, the most recent figures show a decline in participation in higher education from some districts in Dublin. No stars for that, then.

But whether the opposition would have done better or not is a bit of a red herring. The present Government was gifted with the greatest wealth any Irish Government ever had, on a scale that few in Europe could have contemplated, and at the end of all that, it looks like we’ve roads and headaches. A hangover, without necessarily having had the good time beforehand. Sure, someone had a party, but was it you?

Enough complaints. Some of the Government did really well – Micheál Martin, both when he had the tide flowing with him in Education and when it was against him in Health. Dermot Ahern did well in many respects, as did Joe Walsh and particularly Brian Cowen in Foreign Affairs. Some of the juniors excelled as well, like Willie O’Dea, who surprised many with his wit and candour in a hotpress interview, and made most of his purgatorial posting to a junior ministry in education.

But now the end has come, as it does, mercilessly and remorselessly.

Whatever happens as a result of this election, it won’t rank beside the astonishing and troubling outcomes of the French elections, in which the far-right politician Jean-Marie Le Pen outpolled the socialist Lionel Jospin. Inevitably, the French have taken to the streets to protest. Which is all very fine and dandy, except when you remember that the number of votes cast was the lowest since 1959, that much of the abstainers were young, as are most of the protestors. If they’d just gone and voted in the first place, they wouldn’t have to hit the streets to complain about the outcomes.

Get the message? Listen to what’s being said. Make your own mind up, and use it.

The Hog