Minister disregards principle of equality

Rather than sharing our wealth, the Government is intent on taking from those who have least

CHARLIE CHAWKE was on the radio the other morning telling listeners how he and a few mates were putting together €100 million (or is it £100 million) to buy Newcastle United Football Club in Britain. His tone was confident. He would not have much trouble raising €100 million from a few pals who, apparently, have such vast cash resources to spend on what is really just a frolic.

Charlie Chawke is an admirable fellow, not least because he is a Limerick hurling supporter, but also because of the extraordinary fortitude he has shown in circumstances in which he has lost a limb following a confrontation with armed robbers. There is also a forthrightness about him which is admirable.

But isn’t it extraordinary that there remains such vast wealth at the disposal of a few, to spend on toys for big boys, at a time when well over half-a-million people are facing financial devastation because of the economic crisis (half-a-million people will be on the dole before long and they and their families will have to make do with the meagre allowances from social welfare, which means that probably close on two million people may be affected in all)?

And isn’t it all the more remarkable that all the talk now is not about spreading the available wealth more evenly at a time of crisis but on further immiseration of the people devastated by the crisis by cutting public welfare and other major public expenditure areas, such as health and education?

If we were on a desert island all together, recently shipwrecked, wouldn’t we all agree that the fairest way of sharing out the available food and shelter was to share it equally? Wouldn’t we be aghast at the idea that some people wanted to horde supplies of food that they had happened to have with them and over which they claimed “ownership” at a time when others were starving? Would we tolerate that? And now at a time when the whole country is shipwrecked wouldn’t it make sense if we shared out the resources equally or at least a lot more equally?

Christians may be interested in the story of Jesus and the “miracle” of the loaves and fishes, where Jesus fed a multitude with just five loaves and two fish (Mark 6: 40). It is probable that the story was a concoction, inspired by the Old Testament accounts of the feeding of 100 men by Elisa. I am attracted, however, by the interpretation that what was spoken of here in the loaves and fish story was how all were fed by the equal sharing of whatever food was available. Certainly, the story of Jesus that emerges from the gospels is of a person who would not have been sympathetic to the huge inequalities of wealth that characterise our society. But who cares about what Jesus might have meant? Certainly not Christians, well not the high- octane Christians that abound.

Amid all the guff of this Government (which includes a few high-octane Christians) about protecting “the vulnerable”, almost everything about them speaks of the very opposite. The Minister with special responsibility for the “vulnerable”, Mary Hanafin, Minister for Social and Family Affairs, broadcast her indifference to, indeed ridicule for, ideas of equality, in a radio interview last July on Today FM’s Sunday Supplement, which I quoted here before. She was contemptuous of the idea of relative poverty. She said: “It’s ridiculous: you could take a place like Killiney and because Bono lives up the road that your perfectly good professional person down the road is actually worse off because, relative to Bono, of course you’re poor.”

It is depressing that the Minister, supposedly with a direct responsibility for poverty and inequality, should so profoundly misunderstand the point about relative poverty. People who are living in relative poverty are living on incomes that most of us who are well-off would consider penury – and that certainly includes Ms Hanafin, who has an income and perks amounting to at least 10 times the average of those in relative income poverty.

But the main point is that it is relative poverty that matters, even more than actual poverty. For it is inequality that matters most. People living in relative poverty are of lower social status than others. They are disrespected by society, patronised as “the vulnerable” (ie pathetic beings who cannot look after themselves), deprived of the labels and marks of success and of confidence, belittled and humiliated by our culture, as well as by our social and administrative structures.

Mary Hanafin’s big contribution to the present crisis, so far, has been to get rid for the Combat Poverty Agency as an independent organisation. The agency which had been an independent research organisation into incidence of poverty and inequality has been done in by the Minister supposedly responsible for poverty and inequality.

And she won’t stop there.

She will prove her “mettle” over the coming months by sponsoring cuts in social welfare, which she speaks of as being too “generous”.

We remain a rich society. There would be no hardship here, even in these miserable times, if we distributed our loaves and fishes equally. We would also all be happier.