DECEMBER 22ND, 1973: The Yom Kippur war in the Middle East in the autumn of 1973 and the subsequent oil crisis did not immediately dent the optimism of the Fine Gael-Labour government formed earlier that year, as is evident from this interview by Henry Kelly with junior minister Frank Cluskey, a future leader of the Labour Party.
FRANK CLUSKEY, Parliamentary Secretary to the Tánaiste and Minister for Health and Social Welfare, admits to being an excited man these days. “The job is exciting. I’m fascinated by it. Things are happening.” He gestures with both hands, in his third floor office in the Department of Social Welfare, leans forward and says: “Call our plans a shift of emphasis if you like. I think they are revolutionary.” The more you listen to him, speaking slowly in a strong Dublin accent, the more you tend to agree.
When Cluskey entered his new office on the first day of power for Mr. Cosgrave’s Coalition Government he found almost at once that the Department he was to be in charge of had problems. “I found that we were a place where you just doled out money with no serious considerations given to how to solve the problems which made the money necessary in the first place,” he says. “In other words, we were not trying to solve problems, we were just trying to cater for them.” Cluskey regrets that more people are not aware of what has been happening in the areas under his aegis since the Government took office but he accepts it philosophically as he talks about the task.
“In the 14-point programme the Coalition put before the electorate the elimination of poverty was a priority. We committed ourselves to begin by trying to alleviate poverty and then end it altogether. These weren’t just words. That was a serious, one of the most serious, commitments of the lot. We have set about it this way. First isolate the problem areas. Take the very attitude of social welfare recipients for a start. Some of them, especially the elderly, look upon the assistance they get as a hand-out, as a state gift or the like. We want to tell them, again and again, that it is their right, their entitlement whether they have contributed to their pensions, say, with money over the years or in the case of non-contributory pensions if they have given this community their life’s work.”
Cluskey found this problem one of the most tragic of all. It will be one of the difficult ones to solve too. Changing a mentality that has existed maybe for generations will not be done overnight, “But don’t think that just because we know it will take time that means things aren’t happening at once. I can tell you some of the results of our new approach apart from those which have been implemented already will be seen very quickly indeed.”
What then in a nutshell is the new approach? Cluskey explains “As I’ve told you we used to just hand out the money. We seemed to believe that social problems could be solved by just giving a few bob here and a few bob there. Every now and then it would increase and we’d appear to be content. But now the Government with its poverty alleviating commitment is going several stages further. We are finding out why a given social welfare recipient needs the assistance and what more can be done for them. Take a man on home assistance for example. Let us say he is, as most are indeed, anxious to get work, not a lazy man at all. Now after a few months, maybe even only a few weeks, the best man in the world will change if he cannot get a job. Taking home assistance could become a way of life . . . What we want is to get trained family assessors to find out what are the other needs of that man and his family. They could be in legal trouble, medical care might be required, the woman might even want basic information on how to run a house. If you like it’s a concentration on all the needs of the needy: that is the difference between past policies and the present.”
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