The latest research from the Combat Poverty Agency challenges widespread perceptions that poverty is more an urban issue and therefore more of a threat to people living in large towns and cities.
Images of Hogarthian squalor and deprivation, as captured in the 18th century satirist's Gin Lane London sketch, are etched into the public consciousness, beneath layered imagery associated with the closer-to-home reality of Victorian slum tenement poverty.
Urban living has exerted a magnetic pull from life on the land in all post-industrial societies precisely because, whatever the reality of slum life, people believe that if they migrate to cities, they and their children will, in the longer term, have a better chance of a better life. Thankfully, in most modern societies, including this one, inner-city deprivation has been reduced from sprawling tenements, street upon street, to a scattering of black spots.
The agency's report, Mapping Poverty: National, Regional and County Patterns, which was published yesterday, finds that people in parts of Donegal, Mayo, Leitrim and Longford are at the greatest risk of not being able to afford the basic necessities of life, including adequate clothing, food and heating. This week's job losses in Donegal serve to underline the grim state of play in the north-west. According to Helen Johnston, the director of Combat Poverty: "Border and western areas include counties with the highest percentages of elderly residents, the lowest levels of educational attainment, the highest incidence of small farming activity and high levels of economic dependency."
Somewhat against the grain, the report then seeks to downplay geographic factors in poverty but highlights - correctly - the key role of housing. Poor housing and reduced access to housing, is strongly correlated with a risk of poverty, according to the report, and it seems likely that, as far as the identified counties are concerned, factors of geography and history (long decades of inadequate investment) are part of the mix and simply make matters worse.
It is a proven fact that societies in which people willingly support the social contract of high social protection are societies that experience low levels of poverty. Scandinavia is the prime example and the key to a successful social partnership is popular acquiescence. Thus, because people in Scandinavia subscribe broadly to the notion that high taxation is necessary to achieve social justice, high public spending in areas central to diminishing poverty such as housing, education and health is not a make-or-break political issue in these countries.
Here we lag far behind: despite our new-found wealth, social spending is around 16 per cent of GNP compared to over 30 per cent in Sweden.
And if a Swedish government introduced a 20 per cent social housing rule, it is unlikely public opinion would have allowed it to be watered down at the first opportunity under pressure from developers.