Cosmetic changes don’t alter the fact we’re still an unequal society

Fergus Finlay writes an open letter to Minister for Public Expenditure Brendan Howlin.

DEAR BRENDAN,

You’ve moved on already, I imagine. You worked immensely hard on the bits of the Budget that were your responsibility, and I’m guessing it gave you no small measure of pride to be able to announce significant increases in public investment for the first time in years. You deserved that. The job you’ve had to do since entering government has been perhaps the heaviest lifting any Labour minister in history has ever had to do.

You’ll look back at this part of your political career, I’m guessing, as a kind of bittersweet one. When history is written, it will record significant achievements for this government in rescuing the economy from imminent disaster.

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I don’t know if it was quite as bad as the need to order the army to protect the ATMs, as the Taoiseach has claimed (who’s going to rob an empty ATM, I wonder?) but there was no doubt this government inherited a dreadful situation. I still have at home the large bundle of papers prepared by the Department of Finance for one of your early government meetings, and it still makes very bleak reading.

So, well done. I know it hasn’t been popular, and I know there have been a lot of sleepless nights. But you can justifiably claim to have played your part — and it has been a major part — in rebuilding a shattered economy and laying down hopeful foundations for the future.

I’ve written here before that that there is a real possibility (external events allowing) that the next government will inherit a balanced budget, and will be in a position to start fixing some of the things that really need to be fixed in Ireland. They are things that, by and large, can’t be fixed without additional investment.

But, and I’m sorry to bring this up, there was one passage in your Budget speech that brought me up short. You were only on your feet a minute or two when you said this:

“I want to deal with one issue that generates considerable debate. It has become popular to say that under this Government, inequality has risen. This is simply not true. Our adjustment has been a difficult one, but a fair one. Those with the most have given the most.

“Income inequality after taxes and social transfers has reduced during the crisis. The progressivity of our income tax system means we have been one of the most effective countries in the OECD at reducing inequality.

“To ignore this fact and to point to income inequality before tax transfers is to ignore one of the central roles of any Government; to protect the most vulnerable of our citizens. But the best weapon against inequality is not the social welfare system. It is decent jobs and fair wages.”

Then you went on to list things you’ve done to promote greater equality, like raising the minimum wage and building schools.

But the harsh truth is that we haven’t, in any sense, been engaged in building an equal society in recent years. We’ve been fire-fighting, and taking resources from wherever we can get them — from lone parents and from people with disabilities, to name just two groups who have suffered disproportionately.

Now, well before you came to office we weren’t interested in equality either. We were letting rip, partying. We were hell-bent on building a society that was interested in consumerism and materialism. The divisions that have always existed got worse and worse throughout the years of our prosperity. We responded to the poverty that we knew was embedded in communities throughout Ireland by building roads around them.

That’s in part because equality has never been a concept that we really believe in in Ireland. We pay lip service to it, that’s for sure, but in recent years we hardly ever really use the word at all. We talk about fairness instead, and we satisfy ourselves that we’re doing everything we can.

All the evidence suggests that an equal society is a stronger society, and greater equality underpins a stronger economy. To me it makes sense to eliminate inequalities, one by one. That’s not easy, of course. It requires more than the application of the tax system and judicious use of social transfers. It also means investing much more heavily in services that promote human development and human dignity.

But we seem to me much happier investing in bricks and mortar. It was always my experience when I worked for the government you could persuade the Department of Finance in a flash to invest in a road, because it doesn’t have recurring cost. But it was much harder to persuade the same department to invest in a school, because when you build it you have to staff it. They don’t think in terms of investment in that department, only in terms of spending.

But all the while, the inequalities build. In my day to day work, we know about the values of prevention. There’s a rudimentary family support system in Ireland, for instance — rudimentary because it’s seriously underfunded. But where it exists, it’s delivering amazing results in helping children to grow within their families, and in helping families to deal with problems. It’s often effective in keeping children at home, for example, and not in the care system. And every time it does that it saves the state tens of thousands. But it remains underfunded.

Right now, some children are falling out of the family support system because of homelessness. It’s one of the unintended consequences of a new phenomenon in our country. Right when we’re turning the economic corner, we’re discovering families who have always needed support, and now find themselves living in emergency accommodation with support scrambling sometimes to keep in touch with them. We really can’t pride ourselves on fighting inequality while that’s happening.

Safe Ireland, the national representative body for organisations protecting people from domestic violence, published a stark statistic last week. On one typical, average, ordinary day last year – November 4, 2014 (it was a Tuesday) — 475 women and 301 children looked for protection from domestic violence. On that one day, six telephone calls were answered every hour from people in desperate need of help. Although most could be responded to some could not simply because the refuges were full.

People who deal with domestic violence deal with inequality, day in andday out. They need a modest investment in services — preventative, supporting, counselling and protective services — probably of the order of an extra €30m a year. In the greater scheme of things, it’s not a lot. But it would be a real equality measure, one that would repay itself a dozen times over.

There is a real chance now for all of us to recognise that even if we can’t create a perfect society, we can make massive gains against inequality. Talking about it won’t achieve anything. Equality-driven investment, in services as well as in income supports, is sound investment. Because every inequality we eliminate places us all on a much stronger footing to deal with future economic shocks. That would be a foundation worth boasting about.

Fergus Finlay