Government strategy a poor way to fight poverty

Two separate reports contradict Pat Carey's claim that deprivation and social exclusion are being tackled.  By Vincent Browne. 

Pat Carey, the new Minister for Community, Equality and Gaeltacht Affairs, showed up early yesterday morning at a seminar on poverty in a European perspective. And as Ministers are expected to do, he read a speech which contained the obligatory self-congratulation that every Minister is now expected to intone about how wonderful the Government strategy has been in addressing the fiscal deficit crisis.

There was also the familiar claim, on behalf of the Government, to have reduced consistent poverty and to eliminate it by 2016 – wasn’t that promise made a decade and a half ago to eliminate it by the new millennium?

He said that as this was the European Year for Combating Poverty and Social Exclusion, it offered an opportunity to reflect on how these issues should be addressed. Unfortunately, he himself had no time to reflect and headed off after he made the speech about reflection. Headed off probably to a Cabinet meeting which was due to discuss how to cut public expenditure ever further, including, no doubt, cuts to social welfare, including plans to deprive lone parents of their welfare sometime in the future. So, too bad about poverty and social exclusion.

Pat Carey is one of the more genuine people in politics. He is devoid of the self-important grandeur that Ministers acquire quickly after taking office – even some of the sub-species of Ministers, known as Ministers of State, acquire self-importance almost overnight. But what a pity he did not hang around at the ESRI yesterday morning to hear the other speakers and even to read some of the papers.

The first paper was delivered by two ESRI researchers, Christopher Whelan and Bertrand Maitre and it was based largely on the report the ESRI published a year ago, Poverty and Deprivation in Ireland in Comparative Perspective.

The opening sentence of this report directly contradicted Pat Carey’s claims about how brilliant the Government had been in reducing poverty.

It states: “Despite a period of sustained economic growth from the mid-1990s until 2007, Irish ‘at risk of poverty’ levels remained stubbornly high, where ‘at risk of poverty’ is defined as falling below 60 per cent of median household income, adjusted for household size.”

The next sentence states: “Ireland was seen to compare unfavourably not only with its prosperous EU neighbours, but also with a number of new member states.”

And the reason we have such a high level of “at risk of poverty” is because of the comparatively severe consequences of poverty for people outside the workforce and lone parents. In the case of the first of these groups, those outside the workforce, a great number of these are so disadvantaged because of the ineptitude of government policy which Pat Carey wants us to applaud. And in the case of the second group, lone parents, these are now targets not for welfare assistance but for welfare cuts!

As Pat Carey acknowledged in this speech, there are arguments in academia over the most relevant measurement of poverty, but the report states bluntly: “Overall, irrespective of the poverty indicator, Ireland does rather badly in European poverty ‘league tables’.”

It goes on to say that reducing the number of people outside the labour force will take some time now and “it becomes even more important to address the consequences of exclusion and lone parenthood for poverty and social exclusion”.

Pat Carey might have been interested in another report, Living Conditions and Social Exclusion and Mental Well-Being, that formed the basis of discussion at the seminar.

It is a report of the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions, not a well-known outfit, which perhaps is surprising since it is based in Loughlinstown, Dublin.

It shows that 11 per cent of Irish people feel excluded from Irish society, two percentage points worse that is the case in the EU as a whole. Also 24 per cent think they are not valued, again worse than the EU average.

The report shows that countries that have a lower level of perceived exclusion also have a higher level of income equality, notably the Scandinavian countries.

And aren’t we making all this worse at present by cutting social welfare, and devastating the other social protection services, such as health and education?

This economic and financial crisis is also an opportunity. An opportunity to reconfigure our society in a way that is more equal and more fair. We can do this and address the crisis by requiring those with the most wealth to bear the burden of the adjustments that our predicament demands.

Last December, the ESRI published a report on pensions which showed that currently, over €8 out of every €10 of tax relief goes to taxpayers in the top one-fifth of the income distribution. It said standardisation of relief on all pension contributions (employee, employer and implicit government contributions) could raise revenue of over €1 billion per annum.

It would go some way towards correcting the fiscal imbalance and some way towards creating a better society.