Social Affairs:There's Brendan Gleeson, the articulate Irish citizen, who rages on The Late Late Show about the Third World conditions in the accident and emergency departments of Ireland's hospitals, who describes with emotion and anger the lack of dignity and respect which members of his family experienced in the Irish health system.
Then there's the character Liam O'Leary, played by Brendan Gleeson, the Irish property tycoon in John Boorman's The Tiger's Tail, who symbolises the wealth and greed of Ireland in 2006, who has forgotten where he came from and who he is.
And then there's Brendan Gleeson as O'Leary's twin brother, a homeless man, living on the streets of one of the richest capitals in the world, unable to understand how he got left behind, desperate to survive, unable to jump on the Tiger's Tail.
Which, if any, of these is a personification of the Ireland of 2006?
Taming the Tiger: Social Exclusion in a Globalised Ireland tries to describe and explain the complex underbelly of Ireland today in the context of huge economic growth and wealth. The book is a compilation of essays first devised as a seminar series, which set out to explain "the challenge of achieving local economic, political and social development in the context of globalisation". It documents the growth of Ireland's economy in the context of shifting power from the state to the market, from national to global, from local to national, from those who don't have it to those who do.
Common strands jump out of the multi-faceted themes of Taming the Tiger.
The Ireland we live in has not happened by accident but it is the result of government policy (or lack thereof) that has created a fractured, disenfranchised society where government is distant and unaccountable. A country where those who have benefited from economic growth have no need to engage with the State because they can buy most things they need, while those who have been left behind by the economic growth feel there's no point engaging with the State because there's nothing in it for them.
It is an Ireland where inequality persists, where the taxation and social welfare system has not significantly reduced poverty and inequality. Consistent budgets up to 2004 ensured that taxes on multinational companies, wealthy people and property remained low. Those budgets also copper-fastened increased state dependency on income taxes and VAT, taxes that weigh disproportionately on the poor, thus increasing poverty and inequality. Meanwhile, welfare payments have not remained in line with incomes so those who are not working, such as older people, carers, homemakers and people with disabilities, are disproportionately poorer than the rest of society.
It is an Ireland that still has the lowest levels of social protection in Europe despite being one of the wealthiest countries, that is, we spend much less than all our European neighbours on public services and safety nets that prevent people from becoming poor and staying poor or excluded. It's a nation that has a narrower form of local government than any other European country. In Ireland, local government has no role to play in education or public transport, no ability to raise taxes and has become increasingly centralised, contrary to trends across the rest of Europe.
Yet despite the political rhetoric about reducing poverty and decentralising power, Government action in these areas is doing the opposite.
This book is a must-read for anyone who is interested in contradicting the rhetoric of David McWilliams and Michael McDowell, for anyone who wants to better understand the characters of Boorman's A Tiger's Tail.
McWilliams thesis that Ireland has not got more unequal is challenged, McDowell's notion that inequality is good for Ireland is refuted, while Boorman's satire is explained.
It is also a book that moves beyond the soundbites, the caricatures and pigeonholing of sections of the population of boom-time Ireland, which tries to illustrate and account for a more complicated, globalised Ireland, and which situates poverty and inequality in the context of wealth. It demonstrates how our social deficits manifest themselves at local level in the everyday lives of citizens and it is here that the future lies.
YET, DESPITE THE common themes in Taming the Tiger, it is a book with a disjointed range of topics in a diverse range of lectures, some of which are more readable than others. And while each is interesting in its own right, they don't quite hang together.
Happily, the disparate strands are woven together at the beginning and the end by the editors. Peadar Kirby, one of the editors, whose analysis is the most eloquent, also provides some hope for the future in the final pages. He suggests it is time for an alternative political movement, similar to the broad, multi-faceted civil society movement in Ireland in the last decade of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th century. A movement that would ensure that the benefits of growth are used for the good of society as a whole and not just to enrich the elite; an alternative that is built from the bottom up.
Perhaps it is time that articulate citizens ally themselves with the homeless and excluded, and maybe even some benevolent property tycoons, to build a political movement that could propose and work towards "a different, more egalitarian and socially responsible society".
Taming the Tiger: Social Exclusion in a Globalised Ireland Edited by David Jacobson, Peadar Kirby and Deiric Ó Broin Tasc, New Island Press, 208pp. €14.95
Sara Burke is a journalist and social policy analyst