VOICE OF EXPERIENCE:We should assert ourselves as a nation to bring about a cultural, psychological and economic revolution, writes RORY HEARNE
MY FAMILY returned to Ireland in 1979, the year I was born, after emigrating to Canada in the 1960s. My father went about trying to set up a modern farm on a relatively small plot of land inherited from his uncle a few miles outside Tramore. Young, enterprising farmers like him were told they would be supported in doing this, but in 1984 the milk quota system was introduced which rewarded the larger, established, dairy farms. As a result he struggled for years trying to make the farm financially viable.
Things weren’t helped by the voice of small farmers being reduced as the local dairy co-operatives transformed into big businesses that focused on generating returns for their financial investors. When the day’s classes were over at the local Christian Brothers I would cycle out to the farm to help him out. I watched with frustration the neighbouring farmers surviving with less hardship. I was raised to struggle against establishment systems and injustice.
My active involvement in social justice and left-wing politics began in Trinity College Dublin in the late 1990s. As president of the students’ union I led with committed idealism. We organised a banning of the sale of Coca Cola in solidarity with workers suffering human rights abuses in Colombian factories, held boycotts of the canteen against rising prices and fought the reintroduction of fees. My studies and reading of various Marxist and third-world liberation literature developed my theoretical approaches.
It was inevitable that I would join up with socialists as their analysis that capitalism was at the root of the world’s problems provided a framework for my anger at injustice. It makes me smile and cringe now, but I believed that radical, revolutionary, change was about to happen in Ireland and we would be leading it.
For a number of years I put extreme effort into campaigns against the Iraq war, organised protests against the International Monetary Fund and G8 around the world, protested to save local hospitals and supported grassroots community issues.
Around 2005, I became frustrated with the failure of larger left-wing political parties (Labour, the Greens, Sinn Féin) to give voice to a radical opposition to the “free-market” neoliberal Celtic Tiger policies. Along with a few other committed individuals, I led the development of a new political organisation, the People Before Profit Alliance, that aimed to bring together diverse grassroots campaigns, independents, left groups and socialists. I believed that if we joined together we could be a real force in Irish politics. However, potential participants were not prepared to put aside their differences and join and I became disillusioned by it.
In 2007, I started working as a community worker on a regeneration project in the Dolphin House local authority flats complex in Dublin’s inner city. Dolphin is one of many communities that continued to suffer social exclusion and poverty throughout the period of the Celtic Tiger. The engagement in this area of work fundamentally challenged, and transformed, my beliefs and practice.
It has been heartbreaking, deeply moving, depressing and enraging to see the way some people suffer in these areas. The inadequate housing conditions are almost Dickensian. Sewage invades their sinks and baths and causes repugnant odours that result in headaches and nausea. You can see some children, coughing and sick with constant chest infections, pneumonia, bronchitis and E.coli infections that appear to be caused by the poor conditions.
You feel intensely their isolation as the estates are taken over by gangs and the fear that their children will be drawn into running drugs for the dealers or, worse still, end up on drugs themselves. At the same time you are taken in and surrounded by the warmth of their solidarity and support for each other. They have incredible resilience, hope and determination.
Initially, I advocated protest against the ineffective and “corrupt” State agencies, such as Dublin City Council, the Garda and “establishment” political parties that were failing the community. But such approaches did not provide solutions. In fact we have found that negotiation, strategically building allies from all sectors and advocating for small changes has achieved significant progress for the community.
Experiencing the residents’ reality each day in work; their desperation at living in what, at times appears like a human wasteland, “a dumping ground for vulnerable people” as one resident put it, opened my eyes to an undeniable truth. That is that you really cannot understand the change that is required for those suffering inequalities unless you genuinely experience and understand those affected. Solutions must be worked through with them (as they are the experts on their own lives) and they must be empowered to become leaders.
Sustainable, embedded, social change takes time. An example of this is the support we provide for the residents to apply a human rights-based approach that highlights how the State is failing to fulfil its housing responsibilities under the United Nations International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Residents have become empowered with the language and sentiment of human rights and are leading the positive action for change. An important aspect of this process has been the independence from State organisations of the community organisation I work for as it has enabled the direct, and public, challenging of the State’s failings.
On a daily basis, I witness first hand how community-based services are addressing youth, health, education, employment and housing issues. Unfortunately such community work – the heart of many communities – is in danger from budget cuts.
Recently I have seen how young men, who a year or two ago were earning a good wage through apprenticeships and trades, are now unemployed and being lured into the mire of the drugs trade. Unless community supports are in place, we will experience greater drug and alcohol addiction, anti-social behaviour and violent crime. I also now believe that there is a responsibility on communities, local projects, and individuals to try to find ways that they can address these issues themselves.
My shift in perspective from an impatience for revolution to a broader, longer-term, analysis has also been influenced by the outcomes from my PhD research. The thesis investigated the effectiveness of the delivery of public infrastructure and services through public private partnerships and the influence of neoliberal ideology in their policy development.
The findings challenged my perspective that State delivery is automatically the most appropriate method. They suggested that private and NGO models provided, in some instances, more effective and efficient delivery characterised by greater motivation and creativity of employees. The research, along with my community work experience, laid bare the reality that radical reform of public service delivery is essential. Potential reform includes the facilitation of service-users to engage in dialogue with providers to ensure that delivery meets the actual need in an effective and efficient manner.
I have found that many social and economic problems have been compounded by the political, social and popular culture in Ireland which permeates State institutions and political representatives. This culture has promoted clientelist practices based on whom you know. It has led to State institutions allocating their spending according to electoral cycles, reacting to crises and problems as they emerge, particularly on an individualised or localised level and to an absence of long-term planning that prioritises society’s and the economy’s strategic and sustainability requirements. It has also fostered a consensus-based public dialogue, and an anti-intellectualism, that is characterised by a discouragement of radical or challenging opinions.
An adequate theory for change requires culture, history, individual and social psychology and political economy. Using this framework, I now look deeper into the impact of our colonial legacy, the famine, the Catholic Church, the role of the civil war and parties that emerged from it on our present crisis. It is clear that they influenced the development of a cultural deference for authority, a lack of confidence in ourselves, a constant self degrading, and a warped “cute hoorism” that celebrates the bending of rules and regulations.
From a frontline perspective, I see that Ireland needs leadership that takes a stand and fundamentally breaks from the past. Why should we be paying for the mistakes of bankers, developers and politicians for the next 25 years? Why should my children pay for it?
Rather than trying to be the good children of Europe and paying a debt that could destroy our country, we should assert ourselves as a nation and develop solutions that suit us, such as less austerity and more stimulus.
We should not sacrifice generations for problems we did not cause. We face the possibility of “arrested development” a term used to describe Third World countries that had such corruption, poverty and debt that they stalled in growth for decades.
It doesn’t have to be like this. There are alternatives. For example, the regeneration of disadvantaged areas around the country would create jobs in the sectors most affected by the recession. Long-standing communities in these areas can’t just be shifted off to isolated ghost estates. They need refurbished housing in their locality to retain the community, they need health centres, schools, shops, youth centres. This would also provide an important economic stimulus for social enterprise and small businesses.
People are beginning to see that there is an opportunity now to promote self-sustainability and to refocus and reorientate away from the constant drive to accumulate material possessions and instead focus on our families and friends, working voluntarily for our community, understanding politics and economics, exploring genuine spirituality, spending time enjoying nature, exercise and reading.
I believe that aspects of the socialist analysis of the Celtic Tiger period were correct – about the dangers of a boom-bust economic cycle and that the wealth of the boom was being squandered. But as far left groupings, we didn’t have the reach or influence to effect the trajectory of Ireland. It offered a vision, but, for me, it no longer provides the mechanism for practical realisation of radical change.
Our challenge over the next 10 years is to bring about a cultural, economic and psychological revolution, where the broad left achieves a majority position in government and is supported and challenged by a movement of civil society that ensures the delivery of greater equality, employment, support for small enterprise and most importantly addresses the breakdown in our society where suicide, depression, youth violence and bullying, and the marginalisation of the vulnerable have reached crisis levels.
Now is the time for those who are articulating these perspectives to come together. But the old ways and language, the narrowness, the negativity, the purist, dogmatic approaches must be cast away and the space opened for new approaches, new ways and new dreams. Citizens assemblies and referendums are required to develop a new society from the bottom up.
My belief in social justice and social radicalism is not gone. It has evolved and matured through my experiences in academic research and working in the front line in communities.
Dr Rory Hearne is community regeneration co-ordinator at Dolphin House. He was a founder member of People Before Profit but has now resigned from it