Eamon Gilmore is committed to keeping Labour in line with the consensus that all is fine with this society, bar a few glitches here and there which Labour in government can fix. Yes, on RTÉ radio 1's News at One yesterday, he mentioned equality, justice and fairness but the tenor of his remarks was that nothing fundamental needs to change in Irish society; nobody need fear Labour in office, writes Vincent Browne.
What Labour needs, he said was more passion and far better organisation. Labour's target was 30 seats in the next election.
Depressing.
This country is seriously dysfunctional and one would think that any left-wing party would acknowledge that, describe how it is dysfunctional and campaign for support to redress the dysfunctionality.
Nearly one in five people (18.5 per cent) is living on an income of less than €11,000 for a single adult or less than €25,500 for two adults and two children - that is disposable income (income after tax but including all social welfare benefits). That is 764,179 people living on incomes that most of us in the middle-classes would think derisory. Were it not for social welfare payments, the number of people living below this base level would be far higher, around 40 per cent.
Meanwhile, the only commitment the Government parties can make to address this problem is to reduce what is called "consistent poverty". People living in "consistent poverty" are those who have disposable incomes of less than 60 per cent of the median income and are deprived of one or more goods deemed essential for a basic standard of living, such as sufficient clothes to keep them warm and elementary diet.
In its National Plan for Social Inclusion 2007-2016 the then government parties acknowledged that the consistent poverty rate is 7 per cent of the population. That is 290,000 people. And the promise of Fianna Fáil and the PDs was not to use the vast wealth we have accumulated these past 15 years to eliminate consistent poverty, but to reduce it to between 2 per cent and 4 per cent by 2012.
Last December the ESRI published Work Incentives, Poverty and Welfare in Ireland. This report cited a Unicef study showing shocking rates of child poverty in Ireland as compared with other rich countries. Denmark comes top of the list, then the other Scandinavian countries, followed by the Czech Republic, Switzerland, France, later on down seven more places to Greece, then Poland, Australia and Canada, followed by the UK, and Portugal. And on this list of 26 countries, Ireland came 22nd.
Only New Zealand, Italy, the US and Mexico rated worse than Ireland.
The report also gave data on poverty rates for the EU 15 counties for 2004 (that was before the recent enlargement that let in Poland and the rest). The country that was the least unequal was Norway followed, again, by the other Scandinavian countries, then on down to France, Belgium, Germany, the UK and second from the bottom was Ireland. Only Portugal is worse. This was for the data on the total population. Meanwhile the Bank of Ireland's report Wealth of the Nation published recently showed that net wealth per head in the Irish economy increased from €148,000 in 2004, to €168,000 in 2005 and to €196,000 in 2006. Ireland ranked second in terms of per capita wealth among all the rich countries of the world.
The report estimated that the top 1 per cent of the population holds 20 per cent of the wealth, the top 2 per cent holds 30 per cent and the top 5 per cent holds 40 per cent. However, if the value of housing wealth is excluded and there is focus primarily on financial wealth, the concentration of wealth is even greater. In this instance, 1 per cent of the population accounts for around 34 per cent of the wealth.
It estimated that Ireland saw the creation of 3,000 new millionaires in 2006. This was an increase of 10 per cent on the 2005 number.
It estimated there are now 33,000 millionaires in Ireland divided into the following net worth cohorts: 29,700 having wealth of between €1 million to €5 million; nearly 3,000 having wealth between €5 million and €30 million; and 330 having wealth in excess of €30 million.
We all know that aside from property developers (many of whom are billionaires) and business people, that people in professions are earning millions - lawyers, doctors, accountants, architects.
Isn't there something dysfunctional about a society where there are such vast extremes of poverty and wealth? And shouldn't this be the prime focus of a left-wing party? The point of left-wing politics is to identify inequalities, broadcast the facts of inequalities and propose concrete policies to rectify inequalities. But Eamon Gilmore seems just as determined as Pat Rabbitte and Ruairí Quinn to fudge this issue, to speak in generalities about inequality but avoid specifics and certainly avoid specifics on how inequality is to be addressed comprehensively.
So Labour members: vote Eamon Gilmore for more of the same.