VB: CORI seems all very worthy, but are you representing anybody but yourself? What evidence is there that any appreciable section of the Irish Catholic Church believes in a radical redistribution of wealth?
SH: We don't claim to represent everybody in the Catholic Church but certainly we represent more than 12,000 religious (priests, sisters and brothers), to whom CORI is responsible. Also, we interact with a large number of other groups which have a Catholic motivation and ethos and we feel we are part of a tradition with them. I am very convinced that it is a Christian imperative that every man, woman and child have sufficient resources to live life with dignity and this demands redistribution.
VB: Do you think you represent the Catholic Hierarchy?
SH: Oh no, we don't claim that. They have a Justice Commission of their own.
VB: We've had eight or nine years of spectacular economic growth also spectacular success in job creation. Although the rich have got richer, the poor have not done badly either. So what are you on about?
SH: Yes there has been a huge success with job creation but the reality is that after all the economic success, one fifth of the people of Ireland live below the poverty line, the poverty line being at €150 per week. And of these people living in poverty, 70 per cent live in households where the head of the household does not have a job. So the job creation success hasn't dealt with the poverty problem The contention that job creation is the way to end poverty simply isn't viable. We need other approaches.
VB: Where does the figure of 20 per cent of people living below the poverty line come from.
SH: The accepted measure of poverty now both here and in Europe is half the average income in society. According to the ESRI half the average disposable income is €150 and 20 per cent of the population is living on incomes below that level.
VB: Does this mean that no matter how successful we are, we'll always have poverty?
SH: No it doesn't. We could have almost eliminated poverty by now were there the will to do it. The Government is committed to that target by 2007 but it could have been achieved in 2002 if the lowest social welfare payments were raised from €118.80 to €150. That would have drastically reduced the number of people living below the poverty line but other priorities were favoured above that.
VB: How much extra would that have cost?
SH: It would have cost overall somewhere in the region of €1.6 billion which in terms of the resources that have been available over the last several years is not that much.
VB: An issue has been made that the level of consistent poverty has declined significantly in the last five years, isn't that so?
SH: That is true. But what consistent poverty means is not having a second pair of shoes, not having an overcoat, several other such measurements, in addition to being below half the average disposable income. I don't think a great deal of credit is deserving for that achievement.
VB: What are the consequences of poverty?
SH: The consequences of poverty is that if you don't have enough income to live life with dignity in the first place, all sorts of other things kick in. You're excluded in a variety of other ways and the likelihood is that you have poorer health, that your education is not going to be of a level achieved by the mainstream in society. It's also likely that your accommodation may be problematic in one way or another.
VB: You've contended that the budgets over the last while have benefited the rich rather than the poor but this has been a feature of all budgets I think, over 15 years?
SH: If you look at the past five years, on an annual basis, the average is, looking at the income of a single person comparing with say a long-term unemployed person and somebody on €40,000 a year, the gap has widened on an average, year by year of very close to €2,400 a year. In the three years before then, when the Rainbow government was in office, the gap widened by almost €1,000 a year.
VB: There can be no redistribution of wealth and resources without resort to taxation. What taxes are you in favour of increasing to pay for the improvements in social welfare benefits?
SH: Corporation Tax has come down to 12.5 per cent or is coming down to 12.5 per cent. I think we need to honour the commitments we have made but I don't believe there is any evidence to suggest that if it were five percentage points higher that there would be any outflow of capital from Ireland or that there would be any less foreign direct investment into Ireland.
VB: You don't think that direct investment into Ireland is at least partly influenced by the lower level of corporate taxation?
SH: Of course it is.
VB: So it would need to be less then?
SH: It would still be a very low level of Corporation Tax at 17.7 per cent. The point I'm making is that there is no evidence that I am aware of to suggest that companies would not come to Ireland if the Corporation Tax rate was five percentage points higher. But there are other possibilities I think we need to look at - ecological taxes are an issue that we need to address.
VB: You mean higher taxes on petrol for instance?
SH: Possibility, possibility, or with variations on, there's quite a range of possible carbon taxes and other environmental taxes. We have no property tax, we are the only country in Europe without a substantial property tax. It's one of the reasons that consequently we have put a lot of the emphasis on income tax.
VB: What marginal groups in general ought we to be paying particular attention to now?
SH: Refugees and asylum-seekers are the growing new group and they are a very excluded group at the moment.
VB: What should we be doing for them?
SH: We should get away from direct provision, which is this idea that they get £15 a week, or the equivalent in euro, and they get their accommodation and food and that's it. That's an appalling situation and secondly, if an asylum-seeker is in Ireland for more than six months, then the Government has not met its own target on processing their applications for asylum and consequently they should give them the right to work.
VB: What other groups?
SH: Travellers obviously are a very excluded group. There's a huge issue around the Travellers that needs to be addressed which is a need for 3,100 accommodation units for them. I think homeless people are a critically important group of people that again are not getting the attention that they should get.
THE CORI Justice Commission celebrated its 21st birthday on Thursday with a lecture on St Paul by the biblical scholar, Dr Jerome Murphy O'Connor and a statement by its director, Father Sean Healy, on the imperatives of redistribution, a familiar theme from that quarter.
I asked Father Healy what was he, a priest, doing meddling in politics, instead of attending to priestly duties, hearing confessions and finger wagging at courting couples in ditches. After a spasm of loud laughter, he answered solemnly about doing the will of God (I have long since given up asking solemn people how they think they could possibly know what the will of God is) and that he was attempting to promote this in his work for justice through the justice committee of the Conference of Religious of Ireland (CORI).
He says he never seriously considered leaving the priesthood, he never doubted the existence of God or the divinity of Jesus. He says Mass every day. He protests that spirituality is central to his life and is central to all human societies.
But whatever the source of his motivation, he has become a considerable force for economic and social justice by becoming one of the social partners in the negotiation of the national pay agreements.
He was born in Blackrock, Cork, in 1946. His father was a truck driver from the Gaeltacht area of west Cork. There were eight in the family, Sean was the oldest. His mother was from Clare - she is now in her 80s. He went to the Christian Brothers in Sullivan's Quay in Cork and then joined the Society of African Missions.
Hewas ordained in 1969 and in the following year went on the missions to Nigeria where he spent 11 years apart from a year out at Fordham University in New York to do a master's degree and later a doctorate in sociology. He returned to Ireland in 1982 and the following year joined the justice office of the Conference of Major Religious Superiors, as CORI was then known.
The Conference represents 12,000 religious, men and women in 135 religious congregations in 1,400 communities in the whole of Ireland.
The CORI offices are in the Milltown complex (his word) in Ranelagh, Dublin. It is a fine, large three-storey building, with a massive stairway and wide corridors. He points out (defensively, I thought), that the building has no lifts and he has to climb the three storey stairway several times a day.
At the outset of the interview he acknowledges his tendency to go on a bit. Partly as a consequence of that and partly as a consequence of another tendency - to express himself indecipherably - we have several "takes" of some of the questions.
