Madam, – The McCarthy report may be seen as providing value for money, but it certainly doesn’t provide any values for money for Ireland’s future.
Recommendations within the report will underpin, and in many cases, worsen inequality in Ireland – already 22nd out of 29 developed countries on the inequality scale according to the OECD. But, these particular snips have largely gone under the radar in analysis to date.
Aside from the shameless proposal to make poor people poorer, and even more unequal, the report proposes a reduction of €1m in already underfunded projects to improve equality between men and women in the workforce and to support the advancement of women to decision-making levels in work and civil society.
What this says is that in time of economic difficulty it’s okay for women to play second fiddle in the workplace or in public life. This type of “jobs for the boys” crisis thinking is more suited to the policies of Eamon de Valera.
The report proposes a reduction of 10 per cent to the non-pay budget of a number of agencies within the justice vote, including the Equality Authority, already crippled with a cut of 43 per cent to its budget last October. It wants to abolish the office of the Minister for Integration at a time when xenophobia and racism are more likely to increase.
It also recommends a reduction of €1 million a year in the allocation to other equality organisations and projects, in particular national women’s organisations and Cosc, which tackles domestic, sexual and gender-based violence.
As a further retrograde step, it recommends that disability policy would revert to the Department of Health and Children rather than remain as a core element of the equality remit. This would turn back the clock to days when disability was seen as a medical problem rather than a social issue. Finally, the proposal to cut €10 million from the voluntary and community sector and scrap Rapid, which works with some of the country’s most forgotten communities, will cost, not just the people living in these communities, but Irish society dearly in the long run. – Yours, etc,