Opinion Vincent BrowneTake a line at €180 per week (€9,360 per year) for a single adult and €418.30 per week (€21,752) for a household of two adults and two children. I think most of us would agree that anybody or any household earning incomes of less than those are in dire straits.
Many of us spend €180 on a night in a restaurant from time to time, indeed sometimes far more. For those of us who are well off, we cannot begin to comprehend how a single person would live on €180 per week or a family of two adults and two children could live on €418 per week. This is poverty, however you measure it.
And yet nearly three-quarters of a million people here (720,765) live on these incomes or less. One in every four households lives on such incomes.
The unemployment benefit rate is well below those figures. It is €134 per week for a single adult, and for two adults and two children it is €257.80 a week. How, conceivably, could a family of four live on that? According to the ERSI one in four children in Ireland lives in poverty (as defined above), which amounts to over 250,000 children living in poverty.
There are nearly 400,000 people aged over 65 in Ireland now, of whom 114,000 live alone. More than 44 per cent of elderly people live in poverty, which is hardly surprising given that the old-age pension is €154 a week, and in the case of two elderly people living together, they get €255.80 per week.
What is it about our politics that these issues are not top of the political agenda? How is it that tax cuts - which imply even greater disparities between those on high incomes and those dependent on State allowances - dominate political debate? How is it that no political party has the gumption to insist on fairness first and then but only then tax cuts, if necessary?
On Saturday evening at the RDS Pat Rabbitte, leader of the Labour Party, did his now customary cabaret act to the amusement of his party delegates and some of the television audience. There was the commitment to "work with every ounce of energy, every intellectual resources I can muster" to build a fairer society. But his every ounce of energy and not even his proclaimed intellectual resource could muster a specific commitment to undo the vast injustice there is at the heart of Irish society that consigns such a huge proportion of our people to poverty.
Not far from the RDS there is visible evidence of such poverty. In a report published by Dublin City Council in 2002 (Profile of Households Accommodated by Dublin City Council) it was revealed that nearly two-thirds (62.5 per cent) of all households were in poverty, and these included 16,500 children. More than 70 per cent of women aged over 65 living here were living in poverty.
How could those of us, who get (I almost wrote "earn") high multiples of the incomes allocated to those people, object to increased taxation for the purpose of removing such people from poverty? Isn't there something revolting about a society that rewards some people so spectacularly (and I include myself here for I get close to €200,000 per year in gross pay) and allocate such miserable rewards to so many others? Contrast two groups in Irish society and consider if how we treat each of these is fair.
About 40,000 people here provide unpaid help to ill or disabled people for 43 hours a week or more. These carers are mainly women and, it is estimated, one in 10 women in their 40s and 50s is a full-time unpaid carer. These people survive on social welfare. They save the State hundreds of millions of euros - the Carers' Association claims the figure is €2 billion.
Contrast them with those who figured in the Rich List in the Sunday Times three days ago. This showed that Tony O'Reilly added well over €250 million to his already vast fortune last year. Tony Ryan had a punt on a new airline in the 1980s. It has earned him and his family a fortune worth around €1 billion. He lives, apparently, in Monaco. Bono and his U2 chums are worth €617 million and they escape a sizeable chunk of tax from earnings they make on their music compositions. J.P. McManus has made a €538 million fortune from gambling and he isn't bothered by Irish tax demands for he lives, apparently, in Geneva.
Denis O'Brien is worth €416 million, mainly due to the award of the second mobile phone licence to his company by Michael Lowry in 1995.
Several other Irish fortune-holders added, in total, billions to their riches. In many of these cases, not a single job was created as a consequence of those enrichments. What is it about our social arrangements that it is okay to award already vastly rich people by further fortunes year in year out, make no effort to collect from them even the very modest taxes we extract from others, while we expect thousands and thousands of people to live on allowances of €134 per week?
(I am indebted to the recent report by CORI, Priorities for Fairness, for much of the data above.)