Social partnership faces a challenge from the community sector, writes Peadar Kirby
As a new round of partnership talks opens, public attention is focused on a clash between employers and trade unions over pay. However, a book just published offers substantial evidence of serious tensions between the State and the community and voluntary sector over poverty reduction.
While the Government likes to present social partnership as offering an influence on policy-making to groups working with the most marginalised in Irish society (who collectively constitute one of the social partners), this new evidence shows that such groups believe they have no real say, distrust the State and politicians, and are sceptical about how much the process contributes to reducing poverty.
Overall, it reports a relationship between the State and those involved in community development "suffused with antipathy and strain".
The book, The Politics of Community Development, by Prof Fred Powell and Dr Martin Geoghegan of the Department of Applied Social Studies in University College, Cork*, offers the first comprehensive survey of the views of those involved in local community development throughout Ireland on a range of issues including social partnership and the State's commitment to the poor and marginalised.
The authors view Ireland's experience of social partnership as an experiment, unique in Europe, in fostering a new approach towards addressing the needs of the marginalised through local community activism and empowerment. As the book documents, the Irish State over the 1990s has channelled significant amounts of funds to community groups with the result that they have become almost entirely dependent on State funding.
This dependence, write the authors, is "reproducing the elitism of the welfare state bureaucracy in which volunteers are being marginalised". Meanwhile, "activists express an acute discomfort about their positioning as critical of the State, yet reliant on it for a living, and the contradictions that this entails".
"Community development, at many levels, has become a sub-contracted part of the government, having lost much of its potential for challenging the structured social relationships that first alerted its activists to the need for social change. This was openly recognised by many interviewees, from whom an overall impression is gleaned of falling morale as a result of their positioning as the managers of the fall-out of poverty," write the authors.
Many of those interviewed are sceptical about the Irish State's commitment to reducing poverty. When asked whether the State has played a positive role in the fight against poverty more answered negatively than positively, while almost half of those interviewed believed the State has contributed to the deepening of poverty.
Close to 90 per cent believed the Celtic Tiger boom has not been a positive development for all Irish people and has widened the gap between rich and poor.
While the authors find mixed views about whether Government policy has improved or worsened the position of women, the young, those with disabilities and those who misuse drugs, it found far more critical views about policy on Travellers, asylum-seekers and refugees. "Community activists are damning of multiculturalism related social policy initiatives" for such groups, they write.
Yet, when asked about their involvement in social partnership, most saw it as a positive experience though they were more divided on whether it was improving the lives of the excluded. Significantly, most disagreed that social partnership is about controlling the community and voluntary sector, something alleged by critics of the process.
Despite this more positive attitude to social partnership, however, those interviewed were very critical of the civil servants involved in the process, seeing them as inflexible and bureaucratic. The authors also report what they describe as "withering observations on the quality of politicians" and a "deep despair about formal politics in general".
Overall, therefore, this book offers a timely contribution to assessing what has been seen as one of the most innovative aspects of social partnership, namely its involvement of community groups. However, if it brings to light the severe tensions hidden behind the façade of consensus which cloaks the whole process, it also highlights the dilemmas facing the community and voluntary sector.
As is extensively analysed in this book, the sector faces two options. One is the partnership model involving co-operation and interdependence with the State. However, as the authors write, "there is a profound contradiction" at the heart of partnership, "the pursuit of social inclusion in a market-led economy that is widening social inequality as an integral function of wealth creation".
The other option is that illustrated by the co-called "anti-globalisation" movement, namely to mobilise the discontented to mount a more radical challenge to the status quo. Comparing the extent to which four groups, "the homeless, AIDS sufferers, the unemployed and the undocumented", have managed to constitute effective social movements in France and, the book finds, "Ireland is much less advanced in this regard".
Already, motivated presumably by the concerns that find expression in this book, a number of social organisations left social partnership in April 2002. On the evidence of this book, others must be grappling with the ever sharpening contradictions of remaining involved.
As Prof Powell and Dr Geoghegan write: "The anxiety must be that this is a Faustian bargain in which a state that has embraced neo-liberalism and is replacing welfare policy by an enterprise culture is seeking to incorporate civil society into a project of governance that will fatally compromise its ethical legitimacy". And, they could have added, its political effectiveness.
* The Politics of Community Development is published by A&A Farmar at €20.
Dr Peadar Kirby is a senior lecturer in the School of Law and Government, Dublin City University, and author of The Celtic Tiger in Distress: Growth with Inequality in Ireland (Palgrave, 2002).