THE recently published 1997 Human Development Report of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) contains one table which Ireland leads. The table lists 16 industrial countries according to the percentage of their population below the poverty line; Ireland is at the top with 37 per cent, while the next worst are Spain, at 21 per cent, and the Netherlands and the USA, both on 14 per cent.
It can be argued that, since the figure for Ireland relates to 1987, things have undoubtedly improved for the poor since then. However, if we use more recent figures to add Ireland to an accompanying table in the UNDP report which gives the share of the population in income poverty, we would again come out on top. This shows 19 per cent of the US population and IS per cent of the British population receiving incomes which are 60 per cent or less of average incomes; according to ESRI figures for 1994, 34 per cent of the Irish population fall into the same category.
All of this highlights the importance for Ireland of the theme of this year's UNDP report - poverty eradication. It also gives us an international yardstick against which to evaluate the Government's National Anti-Poverty Strategy (NAPS) proposed by the three leaders of the outgoing coalition last April. Since it has been made an integral part of Partnership 2000 the NAPS should survive the change of government.
The very attempt to develop a national anti-poverty strategy was itself inspired by previous Human Development Reports of the UNDP which recommended that each country draw up anti-poverty plans with specific targets. The Government has now set itself the target of reducing the numbers of those who are defined as "consistently poor" from between 9 and 15 per cent in 1997 to between 5 and 10 per cent in 2007 with a mechanism for monitoring progress also put in place.
The understanding of poverty contained in the NAPS mirrors in important ways that of the UNDP. Poverty is viewed not just as low income but includes multiple deprivations which prevent people from enjoying an adequate quality of life. Examples are lack of a job and being excluded from social networks, such as community, family and neighbours.
Furthermore, many of the specific measures which the UNDP urges the governments of industrialised countries to take to combat poverty are contained in the Irish anti-poverty strategy. These include freeing the low paid from income tax liability, changing the structure of taxes and benefits to encourage the unemployed to take a job and upgrading social welfare entitlements, especially for the elderly and for children.
The Irish strategy stops short, however, of any commitment to "raising the basic tax rate for the better paid, who have been receiving a disproportionately large share of recent income gains", as urged by the UNDP.
A final point on which the Irish strategy mirrors that of the UNDP is in its emphasis on "the involvement of those affected by poverty and social exclusion in the process of regeneration".
There are, however, important points on which the 1997 UNDP report goes far beyond the NAPS and poses challenging questions for it. For example, the Irish strategy acknowledges that it is purely redistributional - "to find a way in which the fruits of economic success can be more equitably shared". The UNDP, on the other hand, says that redistribution is not enough; the pattern of economic growth itself needs to be looked at to ensure what it calls "pro-poor growth".
Among the issues which the UNDP regards as essential for ensuring that economic growth benefits the poor is equality. It emphasises two issues: gender equality to ensure that women do not continue to be bypassed by development, and social equality to ensure that the rich do not benefit disproportionately from growth.
This emphasis on overcoming inequality is missing almost entirely from the Irish strategy. Its focus is on reducing poverty largely through integrating the poor into the labour market. As is acknowledged, however, in a lengthy appendix to the strategy, economic growth is worsening inequality in Irish society.
Nowhere does the anti-poverty strategy itself seek to reverse this tendency. For the UNDP "such inequalities undermine the whole process of development and slow poverty reduction."
Among the measures it recommends to ensure "pro-poor growth" are raising the productivity of small-scale agriculture, promoting micro-enterprises and the informal sector, emphasising labour-intensive industrialisation to expand opportunities and accelerating the expansion of human capabilities.
Apart from the final one which does receive considerable attention, the Irish strategy is extremely vague and aspirational on these issues, largely limiting itself to promising "a detailed examination of the employment potential of the Social Economy sector".
Here is perhaps the greatest difference of all between the two documents. While the UNDP situates the challenge of eradicating poverty in the context of a globalising world economy which is itself generating winners and losers in the development stakes, the Irish strategy lacks any of this wider context and the dynamic it creates. It, therefore, fails to appreciate that poverty reduction requires, as the UNDP puts it, that we seek to "improve the management of globalisation ... needed are better policies, fairer rules and fairer terms for poor and weak countries".
Without such a "mainstreaming of poverty reduction into economic policy, our best efforts are likely to be blunted.
Peadar Kirby is a lecturer in Dublin City University and author of a recent book Poverty Amid Plenty: World and Irish Development Reconsidered (Trocaire and Gill & Macmillan, 1997).