Fintan O’Toole: Children are the collateral damage of austerity

Austerity is a form of child abuse. The abuse is not deliberate, it is not intentionally malevolent, perhaps it is not even conscious. But it is not a mere accident either. Children are the collateral damage of the policy adopted by the last two governments of bailing out banks and shrinking State supports for those most in need. If you drop bombs in an area where you know there are innocent civilians, you know you will kill some of them, even if that’s not what you want. And if you carpet-bomb a society’s social infrastructure, you will lacerate the only childhoods that hundreds of thousands of your most vulnerable citizens will have.

You don’t want to do this, and I don’t suggest for a moment that our leaders, European and Irish, take any pleasure in it. But they knew for sure it was going to happen. The fact we now have 400,000 children living in households experiencing multiple forms of deprivation may be shocking but it cannot be surprising to anyone in power.

There’s a phrase that is thrown at anyone who ever dares to suggest the punitive European response to the debt crisis is both cruel and ineffective: moral hazard. It means that if societies are not punished for their economic mistakes they will commit them again. In this mentality – still the one that governs us – we are all children. We learn only by getting burned that we must not hold our hands to the fire. But in this little morality play there are real children and real pain. There’s the pain of hunger, of cold, of shame, of falling behind, probably for the rest of your life, because the help you need to get you over the hump isn’t there.

Moral hazard

Where are the moral hazard merchants when children are suffering? Theirs is a primitive, crude, stupid kind of morality: “I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children.”

A good working definition of civilisation would be the gradual ability to move ever further from this jealous God, to replace this warped morality with the notion that children are not guilty of anything. But we’ve been pushed relentlessly back towards this kind of savagery. In effect, the iniquities of the Euroboom are being visited most heavily on those who were not yet born when the bubble burst.

Moral hazard is, of course, just a self-serving slogan: those who worry about it in relation to mere citizens are not in the slightest bothered about it when it comes to the gamblers who had to be rescued from the consequences of their iniquities by those same citizens. But perhaps the phrase might be liberated from this cynicism. For there is indeed a moral peril – a polity that sacrifices children so blithely loses its claim to the common good.

Privilege unaltered

Collateral damage is a by-product of what you target. And the damage to a generation of children is an inevitable result of the target chosen by those who govern us. That target is ambitious: get through a period of potentially revolutionary change with the distribution of power and privilege unaltered. The troika and both governments since 2008 have shown, in this if in little else, that their aim is true.

If you think about an economy such as the Celtic Tiger, in which there was so much bubble money, so much wealth being generated from hype, you would expect the bursting of the bubble to hit the richest hardest as the money that came easily goes the same way. But in fact the policy pursued by both governments in office since 2008 has been hugely successful in steering through a catastrophic collapse without disturbing in any way the distribution of privilege in Irish society.

If we look at the share of income enjoyed by the top 20 per cent of earners and that of the bottom 20 per cent, we can see just how brilliantly this has been achieved. In 2008, when the bubble burst, the top earners had 4.5 times the income of the bottom earners. In 2013 they had 4.8 times the income of their less fortunate fellow citizens. And, of course, these figures relate to income, not to overall wealth, so they greatly understate the gap between rich and poor. They also understate one really new factor – that many middle- income families are now experiencing deprivation.

This has been superbly managed – the privileged do a wonderful job of looking after themselves. But there was never any doubt that children, who are over-represented in the least privileged sections of society, would have to suffer if the structures of privilege were to be maintained. This is a moral choice: we could maintain the social structure or we could protect the most vulnerable but we couldn’t do both.

There is no question about which choice was made. The only question is whether that’s a choice Irish society is happy to live with. All political parties and movements should tell us their answer.