Gap widens between Haves and Have Nots

Budgets are not what they used to be. Once they were significant, even formalaic occasions with their own set rubrics and liturgies.

A high point was the Minister for Finance holding aloft his ragged briefcase on Budget Day, an image that became the inevitable photograph heading budget coverage in the national press as the great secrets were revealed.

Now, in an age when possible budgetary measures are more-or-less debated months beforehand, there are hardly any secrets left for the minister to reveal on budget day.

As I write, the latest debate is around the possibility of introducing in today’s budget a means-tested second tier of child benefit which would lift, as the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) has said, 40,000 children out of poverty. Taoiseach Varadkar has raised the possibility — while pouring cold water on the proposal by suggesting it might have “unintended consequences” and might not be possible to implement in 2024. The two-step forward, one-step back strategy might be named the Varadkar shuffle.

The reform would provide for all households with children to receive a payment determined by their needs and the number of children and its implementation has been costed by the ESRI at €700m a year. Apparently, according to the ESRI, this would be “far more effective” at reducing child poverty than similarly costed increases in universal child benefit.

In reading about this latest proposal my mind flipped back to 1997, when I read John Updike’s novel, Toward the End of Time, set in 2020.
Updike imagined an America in chaos: war between the US and China had wiped out millions of people and devastated huge tracts of land. The remaining population of the US was divided into two groups: the Haves who continued to live out their extravagant lifestyles in enclosed compounds while paying protection money to mafia-style gangsters; and the Have Nots who skirted the edges of those compounds, scavenging to survive.

Updike painted a grim picture of a society at war, the logical conclusion of a divided country, where on the one hand gated communities —rich, spoiled, extravagant, entitled — are in a state of siege from (on the other hand) where order and all it
represents has broken down and disorder and mayhem abound.

What’s frightening about Updike’s novel is that it represents not just American life with its emblematic array of bolts and locks already taken for granted on the inside doors of apartments but the kind of division that a divided community leads to.

While the picture Updike paints doesn’t apply to Ireland yet, we’re getting there as the same American division is replicating itself all over the world — including here.

Ireland too, like the land our American cousins call home, now has a spectacularly successful economy, now again experiencing phenomenal growth. With the Celtic Tiger of recent years — the provenance of which worryingly no one has ever satisfactorily explained — our economy has once again slipped into top gear with more employed than ever before in our history and the national budget in substantial surplus. All of this was achieved despite the recent pandemic and the war in Ukraine — difficult challenges that heretofore would have represented the kind of shocks that would have catapulted the economy into a steep decline.

But with steady hands on the tillers of state — take a bow Paschal Donohue and Michael McGrath — a series of measures aimed at protecting our citizens from the fall-out from the pandemic and the war in Ukraine seemed to
materialise from nowhere. Suddenly, our small economy so long buffeted by the prevailing commercial winds was now, we were told to our
surprise, among the ten richest in the world.

But, on second thoughts, take a small bow, Paschal and Michael. Because even though we are rich we still don’t seem to be able to house our citizens and lift our children out of poverty.

Rural Ireland remains in steep decline. Poverty and deprivation have remained peculiarly difficult to dislodge while houses, cars and holidays and the other usual parameters of wealth keep
expanding exponentially. We are now, it appears, fully paid-up members of what the celebrated economist, Kenneth Galbraith, called “the culture of contentment” — all this and heaven too! Even Sinn Féin, who gloried in their past revolutionary
fervour, are now, with a general election pending, heading frantically for the hills by reassuring the wealthy that they should have no fear of Sinn Féin in government!

The underlying problem is that those who never had it so good tend to forget about those on the wrong side of the track when the train begins to stall. What’s happening now in Ireland is that the gap is widening between those who have a real stake in Irish life (in terms of work, property, political influence, etc) and those who are part of or becoming part of an underclass.

Some people, of course, don’t believe that there is such a gap, like those who imagine that Ireland is a classless society. Others who made political capital out of the gap are now (like Sinn Féin) in the process of hitching their
colours to the winning side.

The gap is not just undeniable but, in the midst of a second obvious but uncited Celtic Tiger, widening again. We can throw around any number of words like “inclusion”, “social cohesion” and “freedom” and take any number of bows for the ‘modernisation of Irish
society’ but the difficult truth is that while once members of the upper classes never stood in a working-class home, the same dismal reality is still true of most middle-class kids in Ireland today.

Hopefully, Paschal and Michael, whose tenure has served us well in difficult times, will have something worthwhile to say tomorrow; something that might help to close that ever-widening gap. Otherwise, a read of John Updike’s Toward the End of Time might help us to understand where we’re heading.