Mary Hanafin's hint that the poverty agency has no future is terrible news for society's most vulnerable, writes VINCENT BROWNE
ON SUNDAY last there was a discussion on Today FM's Sunday Supplementwith Sam Smyth which focused on the Combat Poverty Agency. The panel featured Mary Hanafin, Minister for Social and Family Affairs, the department with responsibility for the Combat Poverty Agency; Karl Brophy, a former journalist and now a public relations consultant; and Kevin Myers, who is a columnist with the Irish Independent.
Not intending to be disrespectful to Sam Smyth, but issues to do with poverty and inequality are not his bag and therefore it is not surprising he knew little about the subject (presenters can hardly be expected to know about all the subjects they discuss!). Neither was it likely that Kevin Myers or Karl Brophy would know anything about the subject. But even after only a few weeks on the job you would have expected Mary Hanafin to know something, especially as in her former job as minister for education the work and research of the Combat Poverty Agency was centrally relevant to her brief.
Sam Smyth set the tone for the discussion at the outset: "Just before we went off air there was something which I should've known and I suppose most of us should've known. That is that Combat Poverty, which I always thought was a sort of secular wing of St Vincent de Paul, it's actually owned by the Government."
Mary Hanafin acknowledged Combat Poverty came within her new provenance. She said the agency had been established when people needed to focus on combating poverty. She then added the giveaway "but". She said: "But there's a major review of it going on at the moment because over the years other Government agencies and groups have actually taken on that role." She cited these other agencies: the National Education Welfare Board, which deals with education disadvantage; the National Economic and Social Forum; and "more importantly", the social inclusion sections of every department across Government.
Karl Brophy then weighed in with the observation: "The problem is they [Combat Poverty] measure relative poverty, which is a ridiculous measure in many cases. We actually got, according to the CPA measurement, under relative poverty we actually got poorer over the last 10 years, like it is absolute poverty."
Mary Hanafin intervened in enthusiastic agreement: "It's ridiculous: you could take a place like Killiney and because Bono lives up the road that your perfectly good professional person down the road is actually worse off because relative to Bono of course you're poor."
Kevin Myers observed: "We're all agreed on that." (Presumably that the relative poverty measurement is "ridiculous".)
Sam Smyth intervened to remark: "But Combat Poverty is there, why does the Government have an agency to beat itself up, like it's the Government beating itself up is it?"
Mary Hanafin replied: "I mean in its time it probably did play a role on kind of highlighting issues . . ." (Combat Poverty past tense.)
The programme would not merit mention (and, again, I am not denigrating the programme generally or its presenter), nor the fatuity of the participants' contributions were it not for the clear signal given by Mary Hanafin that the Combat Poverty Agency was finished and that the reasons for this were: (a) there is no longer need for an agency to combat poverty since, by inference, poverty is no longer an issue; (b) the "ridiculous" focus on relative poverty; and (c) other Government agencies are now doing the same work.
Mary Hanafin seems not to know that her own Government defines poverty by a relative poverty measurement: if income and resources (material, cultural and social) are so inadequate as to preclude people from having a standard of living which is regarded as acceptable by Irish society generally.
Neither does she seem to be aware that the measure of relative poverty in income terms represents less than €11,000 for a single person or €28,000 for a family of two adults and two children. I suggest that even by the criteria of Sam Smyth, Kevin Myers and Karl Brophy this would represent penury.
The Combat Poverty Agency has done superb work over the years in documenting disadvantage in Irish society, in researching the incidence and causes of disadvantage, and in attempting to bring to the attention of government ministers, policy makers, the media and the public the hard realities behind the facade of a uniformly prosperous Ireland.
Realities such as that education disadvantage continues to blight hundreds of thousands of lives; that inequality generally causes, annually, the premature deaths of more than 5,000 people; that this startling death rate arises from inadequacies in housing, health, education, income and influence.
No other agency fulfils this role. The suggestion that the Office for Social Inclusion does so is a nonsense. On that agency's website its role is outlined, which shows it is primarily an organisation to oversee the implementation of strategies and that in relation to research it "works closely with various agencies including the Combat Poverty Agency . . ."
If the Combat Poverty Agency becomes a victim of the review of State agencies announced yesterday, the Government will be guilty of a sordid, wicked ploy to close off uncomfortable realities and to create space for the victimisation of the most vulnerable, under the guise of efficiencies.