AN ARGUMENT was made in a television programme recently. It was about the aid workers and development workers that Ireland sends to the so called Third World. The programme was made in association with Comhlamh, which is the organisation set up by people who have done this work overseas and come back to Ireland, and who want to bring their experience to bear here.
Usually anyone who has done any job believes in its reality. They may be critical of it, but they rarely question the reasons for the job's very existence. The remarkable thing about the people in this programme was that they were asking a question as fundamental as that.
Should we be sending so many Irish people to the developing world? Should so much of Irish aid be dependent on Irish personnel? Is there a better way of attempting to redress disadvantage than by sending people to "share skills", when the skills may be those of quite another culture?
I'm not talking about emergency disaster relief. That's a separate issue from the "development" one (except, of course, that the world economic order keeps the same places impoverished and vulnerable). John O'Shea of GOAL appeared in this programme, and so did a few affecting pictures of a black woman and child sprawled on the ground, perhaps near death and the usual panorama, smoky with fires, of a huge refugee camp.
Of course, there is no quibble when John O'Shea says we must respond to immediate crisis. But he knows himself, I'm sure, that forceful, managing personalities such as his own tend to leave stunned, rather than revitalised, people in their wake.
It used to be a near conscious policy of the Catholic Church in Dublin, for example, to send dynamic priests from the country - O'Shea types - into the poorest, most disaffected parishes. The idea was that their charisma and energy would lead the locals out of their dope smoking/watching violent videos/shoplifting way of life and into healthy little co ops.
It didn't work. But if everyone in the parishes had been starving, or they were sitting among the ruins after an earthquake, they'd have loved such priests, as John O'Shea is no doubt loved.
Development work raises much more difficult questions. On the one hand, we have people galore here who know how to dig wells and teach the alphabet and give injections and install telephone networks. In large parts of the world there is a shortage of local people who can do such things. If it doesn't cost them anything - if we bear all the costs - what harm could it possibly do to send an Irish nurse or teacher or builder to the poorer country?
Except it does cost them something. In money, it costs them what we spend on recruiting and training and fares and insurance and the rest. If we got that money to them, somehow, as cash, can we believe that that's what they'd spend it on? An Irish "expert"? You will note that we don't do this ourselves. There are radically disadvantaged communities not 20 minutes away from where I sit.
THERE are many, many Irish children out there in bare rooms, sitting in dirty nappies or shoes put by themselves on the wrong feet, eating biscuits in front of the telly while the shaky adults around curse their way through another rotten day.
The comfortable catch glimpses of this third Irish world at murder trials. Nobody thinks of sending for some foreign John O'Shea to help organise a better quality of life for our struggling people. No one thinks that to bring fresh faced Swedes or Americans into our sink housing estates to start self development classes is the way to go.
When it is our own disadvantaged in question we see how intractable and many sided the problem is. We see that it has to do with a whole society, and above all with educational and economic opportunity within that society and between that society and other societies.
But when this is obscured by simplicity, as it is in an African or Asian village, we just see grace and shyness and flashing teeth. We think of their situation as easier to analyse than our own. That's patronising. And we perpetuate, as someone said in the television programme, the relationship of inequality, when we send people from here to the South.
On the other hand, why shouldn't people who have the heart and mind to do this work be free to do it, if they want to? Why shouldn't they go off to wherever it is, with our blessing? The programme itself, We Still Want You, But... almost belied its own argument, because the people who appeared in it were so striking. They seemed to me thoughtful and decent, I suppose I want to say - far beyond the norm. Anyone would want them.
Mind you, they're the ones who question. I've met Irish development workers in various places abroad and they question nothing. They're having a much better time than they'd ever have at home, where the usual social critique would play on them. Priests especially - I've met priests in the Third World who live like Rajahs. Little Lord Jims, hundreds of miles from a colleague, never mind a bishop, and sure - as men, as priests and as white First Worlders - that everything they do is important.
Still, the Irish development workers are not the ones you see careening around poor countries in four wheel drives, doling out money and badly chosen food aid, ordering their servants around, treating everyone barefoot as if they were feeble minded, and swapping stories of local corruption and deviousness when they go to seminars in the nearest western type hotel.
But in a quiet way, Ireland has a Third World establishment. APSO for instance, the "central source of overseas development personnel for Irish and international non governmental agencies", spent £10 million or so last year and one could ask whether that money is not a direct subsidy of a career choice - the choice to work in the Third World - such as few other careers get.
What mattered about the television programme people was not journalistic questions like that, but questions about imagining. For once, a group of people were implicitly asking us to imagine other people. That is what is so valuable about the "development" argument.
A HANDFUL of people have been able to see from another perspective, the perspective of those they went to "help" switch they have been able to make in perspective could very usefully be applied anywhere someone is paid for "helping" others.
What do children need and want from education, for instance, and what have the concerns of the teacher unions got to do with that? What human help do "bad" parents need, and should it be encapsulated in "a social worker"? Why, if you know you've hurt your arm do you have to pay a doctor £17 to send you to a consultant who costs £70 to tell you you've hurt your arm? The Comhlamh people are asking a question even bigger than themselves when they ask: is what we are doing necessary in the first place? If it is, are we doing it right?