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Time to end the prosperity divide
By Joe Horgan
In a e2million project 1,200 flats in Dublin are going to get their first ever bathroom sinks. In Ireland in the year 2004. In this small article in a national paper the Minister for the Environment, Martin Cullen, reportedly said he was “totally taken aback” on learning that these flats had no bathroom sinks.
Well, he is the Minister for the Environment, so it should be in his brief to know and he is a member of the party and the government that has overseen the explosion of wealth in this country, so perhaps we can be forgiven for thinking that by this stage he should not have been taken aback so much as able to say that the matter had been dealt with years ago. Perhaps, he’d begun to believe that the you’ve never had it so good mantra trotted out by his party omits to mention that we have also never had it quite so unfair or so unevenly distributed.
One of the residents was reported as saying that most of the people in the flats had plastic basins so that “‘if the kids are brushing their teeth they’re not spitting on your dishes”. It has a nice ring to it that and I wonder if Fianna Fail might not use it on their next election posters. Vote Fianna Fail; so the kids don’t need to spit on your dishes. Or perhaps their business partners and their thatcherite pals in the Progressive Democrats might find that a bit hard to wash down over the canapés.
On the radio this morning a couple spoke of having a fourteen year old child with cerebral palsy and how until recently they were denied a medical card which would have given them some cover for the child’s medical bills.
Now that they have one, they must reapply for it every two years and give proof of their income status and all the other demands of faceless, soulless bureaucracy. In Ireland in 2004 a family with a child who needs a bit more has to go cap in hand a bit more to get a small bit more from those who oversee a system that has so much, and yet sees fit to keep it in the hands of so few.
And Bertie Ahern and his crew are Irish republicans? Really? Is the essence of that much abused word freedom, at least in an Irish context, that some 80-odd years on from British rule we can now be treated with pocket lining contempt by our own?
During the period of Irelandís history that will be known as the Celtic Tiger, Irish economic expansion was without precedent. Wealth flooded the country and on any glance around it would seem that very many people partook in the bonanza. This was the new Ireland where shopping centres sprang up everywhere and consumerism became the new faith that would lead us all on to enlightenment and fulfilment. This new Ireland buried the old Ireland, often under a spreading swathe of concrete, and all the tired old stories of the past were finally to be consigned to history.
Yet, during this same period, when everybody acquired new cars, mobile phones and bigger televisions the number of homeless people in the country doubled. The Simon Community estimates that up to 10,000 people in this country are now homeless compared to 5,000 in 1993. Doesn’t that suggest something? Does that not point to some sort of disparity between the perceived image of the brand new Ireland and the reality? Does that not suggest some dark canker at the heart of this new society? Or as the prevalent political ethos would have us believe are some people just beyond help, eternally unmanageable and unemployable?
And if that is the case is it merely mischief making to enquire as to how many of this underclass attended our fee paying elite schools and how many of them left behind a life of advantage? And is it unfair and of too personal a nature to mention Bertie Ahern’s own daughter’s celebrity wedding in France during this period? Or, I wonder, should we look into just how many of these people wrapped in blankets on the streets of Ireland knew about a world without bathroom sinks compared to Minister Cullen?
So in this rich country of bathrooms without sinks, children without proper care provision and homeless people with styrofoam cups outside of McDonalds we have a government that wines and dines the wealthy, sees no future for us except that imagined by our economic masters abroad and offers leadership that could best be described as on the hoof.
A luxury hotel not far from where I live which was built during the last ten years overlooking an incredible golden strand attracts select clientele from everywhere. English professional soccer teams pamper themselves there and people from Dublin own apartments there. Out the front in a reserved part of the car park there is a helicopter pad.
On a few occasions when I have been down there people have arrived by helicopter. The hotel staff rush out to meet them and some kind of manager appears to greet them. They arrive obviously in somewhat noisy and attention grabbing fashion. Some twenty minutes later they rush out again and depart. It all seems very sad and vacuous, like a small parody of the values of the Celtic Tiger. Extreme wealth, extreme visibility in having it and an apparently extreme shortfall in the knowledge of what to do with it.
Ireland is not a wealthy country because some people have an extraordinary amount of money and the rest of us have a lot of technological gadgets. That just denotes a certain way of gauging prosperity. In a country where some people still don’t have proper bathrooms some of that so called prosperity remains nothing short of obscene.
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