My first article of 2021👇 in today's Irish Independent. It's dedicated to all the homeless people who died on Ireland's streets this year. Suaimhneas síorai dóibh uile💔
This time last year I took my son to watch A Christmas Carol at the Gate Theatre. We see it every year either on stage or in the cinema, followed by volunteering at a soup run. As someone who grew up in a neighbourhood where Dobermann pinschers doubled up as a fashion accessory and personal security, this tradition has been my way of keeping Christmas real for my son who is fortunate enough never to have known hunger.
This year we switched the lights off, curled up with a bowl of popcorn on the sofa and watched the black-and-white version of the Dickens classic on DVD.
The impact of the scene where the charity collectors attempt to extract money from Scrooge never diminishes however many times I watch it. Affronted that the poor would shun workhouses, for which he paid his taxes, Scrooge admonished them – if they would rather die, they’d better do it, and decrease the surplus population.
Charles Dickens’s words never felt so real, echoes of which prevail in political discourse that depicts poverty, homelessness and asylum as life choices. Equally, the Government’s Living with Covid-19 strategy feels uncomfortably reminiscent of the free-market mantra “survival of the fittest”, compounded by the fact that it is our most vulnerable who have been hardest hit by Covid-19.
It’s our elderly, Travellers, disabled, black and ethnic minorities, people in direct provision and those on the lowest wages, or no income – especially women – who are bearing the biggest burden of this pandemic. It’s a fact that the WHO’s Mike Ryan passionately flagged this week when he said Covid had “ripped the bandages from an old wound” exposing “a deeply unfair, inequitable world”.
Choices about allocation of resources, particularly during a time of crisis, are an indicator of Government priorities and serve to either deepen or alleviate social inequalities.
Some children thrown into poverty during the previous recession remain destitute and are struggling to cope with another crisis. One of them is Aisling, who my son and I met at last year’s soup run.
Having been mistreated for years, she left home at 16 and after a few failed foster-home placements ended up on the streets. That was 10 years ago. The last time she slept in a homeless hostel she was attacked and her only pair of shoes was stolen. A warm bed in a safe place is all Aisling wants. We couldn’t give her that so we gave her a hot meal and a hug instead. There were no hugs this year.
Children like Aisling didn’t cause the recession but over a decade later, they’re still paying the price for it whilst its architects, such as former politicians and bank regulators, had their pensions reinstated before Christmas.
This is a time when some parents had to choose between cold and hunger and around 2,642 children woke up homeless on Christmas day.
The taxpayer bailed out banks to the tune of €42bn (Micheál Martin didn’t get that memo) for self-inflicted bankruptcy, but many show no mercy when customers face bankruptcy through no fault of their own. Family homes were, and continue to be, sold to vulture funds with no protections for distressed mortgage-holders. It was a choice to sink taxpayer’s money into the €1.7bn (and counting) children’s hospital and to fight Apple not to hand over €13bn in tax.
Yet in the middle of a health crisis, the choice was made to deny student nurses €14 an hour, not to adequately resource our public health doctors who are now so overwhelmed that they’re planning to strike. Instead of paying the living wage to the essential workers who keep our shelves stacked and our hospitals clean, our Government chose to award judges and themselves a pay increase of 2pc.
In A Christmas Carol, Dickens contrasts the greed and indifference of the rich with the powerlessness and deprivation of the poor. The emergence of the ragged emaciated children from beneath the ghost of Christmas Present’s robe is an arresting scene. Called Ignorance and Want, Dickens’s wrath was directed at the politicians and affluent of the day for wilfully ignoring the abject poverty in their midst.
Despite being the 14th richest country in the world and having the world’s fifth-highest concentration of super-wealthy residents, more than 689,000 people are living in poverty in Ireland, of whom more than 200,000 are children. On Christmas day, the charity Muslim Sisters of Éire served 350 hot meals and handed out “survival kits” in Dublin. They, like many more volunteers throughout the country, are there every week providing a safety net that the State has failed to deliver.
Charity, though vital, is not a sustainable solution to systemic inequalities caused by bad political choices. In 2020, almost 60 homeless people died in Dublin.
Dickens believed ignorance and want were the two social evils that posed the biggest threat to society and 173 years later, the fact that soup runs, survival kits and homelessness exist in Ireland suggests that we’re still haunted by their presence.
No comments:
Post a Comment