Sir, - John Waters's column headlined "Irish women not poor - they just spend more" (September 22nd), while purporting to deal with the issue of women and poverty, and specifically the findings of the United Nations Human Development Report 1998, was in reality another of his increasingly regular attacks on feminism generally and in particular on organisations highlighting areas of discrimination, disadvantage and inequality experienced by women in Irish society.
United Nations data reveal a situation in this country which holds little surprise for women: that 73 per cent of all earned income is earned by men. John Waters uses this data to make the totally spurious argument that this UN report is defining women such as Finola Bruton and Norma Smurfit as poor. This is nonsense.
Data on earned income is simply that. It tells us who earns what proportion of the income in society. It doesn't tell us who lives in poverty, nor does it pretend to. It is, however, an important indicator of the control of resources in a society, and it does tell us something about the scale of economic dependency among Irish women. John Waters has demonstrated much appreciation of the significance of ownership and control with respect to other aspects of Irish society - for example, the media or the national territory. Such insights have evidently failed him in this instance.
Research evidence does in fact indicate that women in this country experience a significant and growing risk of poverty. The work of Brian Nolan and Dorothy Watson of the Economic and Social Research Institute, presented at a Combat Poverty Seminar earlier this year, revealed that the highest risk of poverty in this country occurs in: (a) single-person households; (b) lone-parent households; and (c) households headed by an unemployed person, a person engaged full-time on "home duties" or a person who is ill/disabled. The majority of the first are elderly women; the vast majority of the second are women and children. The third category includes women, men and children.
John Waters makes a number of other points about patterns of household expenditure and advertising aimed at women. It is no secret, nor is it a new phenomenon, that women carry the responsibility in many Irish families for household expenditure, particularly on food, clothing and household needs. To conclude from this that "not only do women spend more on themselves - men spend far more on women than on themselves" is completely illogical and distorts reality to the point that it is wholly unrecognisable.
Poverty is widespread in Ireland and it affects a significant section of our population - women, men and children. I would have thought that John Water's energy would have been much more productively directed at the structures, systems and policies which perpetuate such deprivation, despite the increasing levels of wealth in this society. - Yours, etc., Ursula Barry,
Women's Education Research and Resource Centre,
UCD,
Dublin 4.