The Taoiseach may call for voluntarism, but there is a much broader problem in the way our society is developing as an economic marketplace, writes Michael D Higgins
Recent calls for a national conversation on citizenship are to be welcomed - but will amount to nothing if the discussion does not fundamentally challenge how Ireland is evolving as a society. It is not enough to call for an increase in voluntarism as the gap between rich and poor widens across the country. The policies of the current Government, embedded in inequality, tend towards making genuine inclusive citizenship impossible.
One of the most discernible and alarming trends in contemporary society is acceptance of politics, society and the economy as separate spheres. Increasingly, economic discourse is perceived as having nothing to do with social critique or a discourse of ethics, but governed by a mechanistic pseudo-rationality. Neither is the phrase "political economy" used commonly in policy debates. The economy is generally free from political direction and left to find its own level, driven by a free market, which is assumed to be beneficial. Poverty is thus seen as an aspect of social policy unhinged from economic policy. This is despite the obtrusive presence of monopolistic tendencies and unrestrained concentration of ownership which, in fact, delivers economic exploitation.
The demand to remove decision-making for the economy from the political sphere is reflected in efforts to keep areas such as public expenditure, pay for the lower paid, borrowing, etc, outside public scrutiny. This is the new "unaccountable" economics: an economics that regards the public as a mere component of a self-regulating economic system.
The individualism of the market place now extends its tentacles into the political sphere, creating a privatisation of political experience. If, in the past, citizens agitated in the public space for the right to participate in the state, society and economy, today it is as consumers that they calculate their market-value perched in the isolated cocoon of the private sphere. It is not through the exercise of citizen power that their demands for change surface, but though the interface of consumers with the market. At the same time, politics itself is reduced to a contest of competing populisms, mired in diminished public trust and viewed as corrupt and disengaged.
From such a broken linkage between economy and politics emerges a society that is characterised by fragmentation, alienation and disillusion. I believe, in fact, that we are drifting to a final rupture between the economy, politics and society. If this happens, the ensuing conflict will not be mediated through trade unions, political parties or social movements. With the wealthy getting wealthier and the poor getting poorer, it will be a naked confrontation between the excluded and the powerful, between the technologically sophisticated and the technologically manipulated, between consumers and the consumed.
There are likely to be few shared norms of citizenship experience which will serve to mediate this conflict. Today, the norms of a shared life have little opportunity to be articulated and debated. Public participation is falling in every institution of civil society. Society is often pathologised and feared as endemically crime-ridden and threatened by "the other". Even technology, abandoned to the marketplace, is adding to the schism, creating new classes of information-rich and information-poor, of literate and illiterate, of participating and excluded.
A case must be made urgently, therefore, for a new and vibrant citizenship that can vindicate such values as solidarity, community, democracy, justice, freedom and equality, and give them practical expression. At the heart of this is respect for the life of the person as having a shared public value beyond the narrow consumer power of the individual. Such an approach to citizenship stands for the right of every citizen to participate in society with the opportunity to develop their personal and social selves in conditions of freedom and communal solidarity.
We should see ourselves as sharing and using the economy and technology to achieve our values. We should see ourselves as the makers of history, not its pawns or passive victims. We should see ourselves - and those yet to be born - as constant and potential creators of advancing forms of human society.
It is the greatest and most exciting challenge at the beginning of a new century: building a democratic citizenship in a just economy and with an ethical politics and an actively participative civil society. A vision of ethical citizenship can infuse every area of policy prescription, for example:
Basic needs in income, health, housing, social welfare, education and culture are provided as a matter of right, as the minimum to ensure participation, inclusion, freedom, personal development and celebration;
Education is accessible and democratic in structure, for the citizen is not simply a consumer;
Workers have rights to organise and participate in the economy and society in ways that go beyond the personal assertion of economic and social rights;
The information society and technology serves citizens, enabling them to participate as never before;
In urban planning, citizens' use of the safe public space is assured over minimal concessions from a speculative market; and
In the area of security and justice, an active theory of citizenship builds bonds of security that stand in stark contrast to today's peddling of purchased safety. It works to develop an understanding of deviance, a critique of law and a spectrum of care and social control, taking into account not just the rights and duties of citizenship but the need to belong.
As the economy grows, such a citizenship requires that all be enabled to participate in that growth and stresses that the purpose of growth is improvement in the welfare of the citizenry. The alternative is a recipe for violence that will inevitably accompany the collapse of political discourse, the rejection of ethics and politics as sources of guiding principles in life, and the succumbing of society itself to an unaccountable market.
Michael D Higgins TD is Labour Party spokesman on foreign affairs