"Very few people can afford to be poor", said Bernard Shaw. The difficulties faced by the estimated one third of Irish society at risk of poverty, or on its borderlines, are highlighted in the annual report of the Combat Poverty Agency and in the Human Development Report 1998, published today by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Their position has been made even more difficult by the very success of the Irish economy in recent years, as employment, consumption and real incomes have risen steadily for most households. Unequal distribution of these fruits has nevertheless ensured that social divisions are widening. Irish society is itself impoverished by the resulting exclusion of a large group of citizens and endangered by the crime and drugs associated with the poorest social groups. The agency has a clear mandate to research and advocate appropriate means of addressing poverty. This was better defined last year in the Government's National Poverty Strategy. It identified five key areas for action: educational disadvantage; long-term unemployment; income adequacy; disadvantaged urban areas; and rural poverty. The UNDP report uses indices of age expectation, functional illiteracy and income levels to give a comparative picture showing a disproportionate clustering of poverty in Ireland compared to other developed states.
The Combat Poverty Agency emphasises the Government's commitment to achieve or exceed targets of halving levels of persistent poverty and unemployment by 2007 and underlines progress made in institutionalising this strategy in the various departments concerned. It lays special stress on ensuring poverty is properly addressed in the Partnership 2000 negotiations; on supporting the community and voluntary sectors; and on learning lessons from the EU Peace and Reconciliation Programme on how local responses can tackle poverty and social exclusion. It is good to see such initiatives recognised, since they often receive insufficient public attention. But the agency also recognises that without clear political will and specific budgetary provision, little progress will be made. In particular, it says the December 1997 Budget "was very disappointing in the priority it gave to tackling poverty". It urges the Government to give practical commitment to this objective in the next Budget.
The Government faces a tricky task in dedicating funds towards the most disadvantaged as well as towards what one sociologist describes as the "discontented majority" in our society - those who are not benefiting in reality, or only marginally, from the ideology of social partnership. Rapid social change is highlighted by a series of articles in this newspaper, along with the resultant loss of a sense of community, atomisation of social relations, work stress, insecurity, and urban congestion. Poverty is relative as well as absolute. A society which fails to deal with both of these dimensions is storing up problems to come.