Lynn Ruane (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I move:

That Seanad Éireann:

notes with concern that:

- in 2021:

- 11.6% of the population of Ireland, or 581,334 people, were living in poverty, of which 163,936 were children;

- 4% of the population of Ireland, or 200,460 people, were living in consistent poverty;

- approximately 16% of those living in poverty, or 93,013 people, were in employment;

- approximately 19% of the population of Ireland, or 952,185 people, were at risk of poverty when housing costs were factored in, and that renters were the worst affected, with 41.6% at risk of poverty after rent was paid;

- approximately 45% of one parent families, the majority of which are headed by women, were experiencing enforced deprivation, meaning that they could not afford goods and services considered to be the norm for other households;

- 13.8% of the population of Ireland, or 691,587 people, were experiencing deprivation, of which 204,710 were children;

- as of 2020, approximately 31% of Irish Traveller households were deemed to be in acute poverty by the European Union’s Fundamental Rights Agency;

- persons with a disability face a high risk of poverty due to additional costs not met by existing supports, which according to the 2021 Cost of Disability in Ireland Report, can range from €8,700 to €12,300 per annum;

further notes that:

- the State has failed to achieve its target of reducing consistent poverty to 2% or less by 2020, and that previous targets in this regard have not been met on a consistent basis;

- the State’s Combat Poverty Agency, which was operational from 1986-2009, played a significant role in raising awareness of and identifying solutions to poverty;

- the shuttering of the Combat Poverty Agency in 2009 as an austerity measure was a profoundly regressive decision, which withdrew resources and focus from anti-

poverty strategies and measures at a time when they were most needed;

- due to the subsumption of the work of the Combat Poverty Agency within the Department of Social Protection, the important independent scrutiny of Government policy overseen by the Agency was lost;

- in the absence of the Combat Poverty Agency, or another equivalent independent statutory body, Government policy has often not been adequately poverty proofed;

- the diversion of resources from long-term anti-poverty research and programmes, like the Combat Poverty Agency, was a false economy, with the increased costs incurred by the State due to the impact of poverty far outweighing the savings made in defunding anti-poverty programmes;

- cuts to funding for the public, community and voluntary sectors have not been fully restored in the years since austerity measures were imposed;

recognises that:

- to be in poverty is, in and of itself, very costly;

- poverty imposes significant psychological, emotional and social costs on individuals, families and communities;

- to make ends meet can necessitate significant sacrifice for individuals and families, which limits options in the short term, and opportunity in the medium to long term;

- poverty can give rise to other social problems including, homelessness, addiction, criminality, mental health difficulties and adverse childhood experiences;

- the deep-rooted harm caused by intergenerational poverty, and the manifold difficulties which are faced by those trying to escape intergenerational poverty;

- the eradication of poverty stands to play an important role in the promotion of equality in Irish life, in both opportunity and outcome;

- it is incumbent on the State to alleviate and eradicate poverty;

- intervention by the State to alleviate poverty should allow individuals and families to thrive and to live happy, healthy and fulfilling lives;

further recognises that:

- the austerity measures which exacerbated poverty and inequality should be re-evaluated in the light of the new international economic consensus, and such austerity measures should never again be imposed upon the people of Ireland;

- the causes of poverty in Ireland are rooted in deep inequalities that pre-date the Covid-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the cost-of-living crisis, although they are further exacerbated by these crises;

- proposed increases in social protection payments and the national minimum wage will not be sufficient to address the loss in disposable income caused by the cost-of-living crisis;

- as well as short term actions to meet immediate need, long-term, planned and sustained investment in people and public services will be required to address the

deep-rooted structural causes of poverty and deprivation, especially intergenerationally;

- poverty requires a whole-of-Government response and its eradication relies on cross-sectoral and cross-departmental mobilisation and communication;

calls on the Government to:

- re-establish an independent Combat Poverty Agency, or a similar independent statutory body, which is empowered and resourced to develop long-term anti-poverty strategies, carry out important research, and lead the Government’s anti-poverty response.

- grant appropriate powers and funding to the new Combat Poverty Agency or equivalent to carry out, inter alia, the following functions:

- advising on poverty proofing of all future budgets, and producing pre- and post-budget poverty impact assessments;

- reviewing, on an ongoing basis, public policies in areas such as welfare, and making recommendations to Government on potential areas for policy reform;

- monitoring and producing annual reports on the Government’s progress towards its Roadmap for Social Inclusion 2020-2025 goals;

- supporting development of the Roadmap for Social Inclusion 2025-2030, with the goal of eradicating consistent poverty in the State by 2030;

- supporting development of long-term anti-poverty strategies for selected Departments, including the Department of Housing Local Government and Heritage, Department of Social Protection, and the Department of Justice, based on ongoing research on the causes of poverty as they relate to the remit of each Department;

- developing specific and targeted anti-poverty strategies in relation to groups with particularly high levels of consistent poverty or deprivation, including, inter alia, Travellers, migrants, persons with a disability, and one-parent families;

and further calls on the Government to:

- support and resource ongoing independent research based on the Minimum Essential Standards of Living (MESL) and apply the learnings from this research in an ongoing analysis of policies relating to welfare payments and the development of a living wage;

- carry out research on the potential introduction of a Universal Basic Income for certain groups, in particular care leavers;

- re-establish the Education Equality Committee and review the DEIS system to ensure an end to education inequality as a key factor in poverty;

- publish the Second Progress Report on the Roadmap for Social Inclusion 2020-2025 without delay.

I welcome the Minister of State to the Chamber. There is a huge amount of detail in the motion and it has a lot of asks. Today I want to ask people to begin to challenge themselves on what they think about what poverty is, how it continues to prevail in people's lives, how invasive it is and the structures that create poverty in the first place.

I come from a very working-class family. My father grew up in the tenements and my mother grew up in Finglas. They did not have much. My father told me stories about having to use beer mats in the soles of his shoes to stop the rain getting in and collecting jam jars to get into the cinema because while they did not have money, they could exchange jam jars to get a ticket. My Grandad Losty in Finglas and other family told me stories about what they brought home from dumps. If there was ever an era for the Green Party it was definitely then, given how much use people made of what they had in very hard and strained circumstances. They made cots for children out of the drawers from a chest of drawers. They made the best use of what they had.

As I began to grow up, I began to observe a different type of poverty. It was not a poverty where I had holes in my shoes. I had shoes on my feet but I had a hole in my heart in terms of my potential, opportunity, who I was going to be in life and who my community would be. I remember realising for the first time how poor so many people are in communities like mine. I was not one of them. My parents worked. Despite the fact they earned low or minimum wages, we never went to school hungry but I watched as my community did. I watched the struggle and the sharing of clothes. My parents secretly gave families on the road clothes that did not fit me any more and tried to keep people afloat.

As I became older and my brain began to take in my environment, I started asking questions about whether poverty is a personal, collective or societal thing. It is very much about power and class. One thing those who experience poverty do not have is power. They do not have the power to be able to create the resources to fix the societal damage that has happened for decades upon decades.

I would like the Minister of State to think about a quote from James Baldwin, who said, "Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor". Poverty costs. It is not only costs in terms of being able to live and survive but it costs the potential of life. Each and every single person has one chance at life. Imagine if that one chance of life was impeded by struggle, pain and having to persevere through life.

I would like to reflect on a comment from the Dáil Chamber this week during a debate when reference was made to O'Connell Street and druggies. How, in 2022, do we have somebody who is the Chair of the Committee on Education, Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science talking about druggies and framing people in this way? We know drug use and addiction prevails in the way it does because of poverty. If we are going to shame anybody, it should never be the individual. Rather, we should always focus on the conditions of capitalist markets and the protection of profits over people that have led to poverty continuing in the way that it does. The term "druggies" is dehumanising and separates the person from who we are as community because they are me, we are them and they are Dublin and Ireland. They cannot be separated from us. A person who uses drugs is often trying to escape the reality of poverty. If we chase the thread back from that type of drug use, it goes back to the halls of power, Parliament and legislation over years that has not radically addressed poverty.

In 2008, at the beginning of austerity, we closed down the Combat Poverty Agency, an independent agency that was responsible for tackling policy and examining budgets, research, causes and solutions. During one of the biggest austerities that any of our generation has ever experienced, the Government closed it down. We do not have an independent agency to try to address poverty. We cannot make cosmetic changes in respect of poverty any more, such as a little bit of welfare here or some charity there. We need to radically address poverty.

In order to radically address poverty, we must radically address privilege because they are relational. It is not about trickle-down economics. Rather, it is about looking at wealth and power and how we dismantle that so that there is equal distribution, instead of putting a load of poor people in a room and asking them how they can solve their own poverty without the resources to do so. That is what we do when we when we continue to look to services and charities and put middle-class ideas on working-class people regarding how they will pull themselves up out of poverty.

The idea is that there is an opportunity in society is false. There is no opportunity in society if the conditions in which we live are so unequal that the opportunity is impossible to see and take. It is never about one person succeeding. We will have only begun to address poverty if everybody succeeds and we lift all communities out of poverty. There is no point in constantly referencing the anomalies of successful people within communities because that is not enough. We need to congratulate people who manage social mobility but we definitely do not need to point to them as some sort of job doneWe must genuinely look at ourselves and at what type of society we want. Wealth and power for the few and misery for the many is definitely not a society that I think any of us wish to stand over.

Going back again to the comments made about drug use and crime etc., I do not think anybody who has ever experienced the things I have had to experience in my life can think people choose that way of life. I know people who feel like they are just waiting to die. Some of my friends are just waiting to welcome death. This is what poverty does. It seeps into everything people are, everything they hope for and their whole view on life. People are getting to the end of their lives and it feels welcome. People wear poverty. They look unwell, they feel sad and they are carrying way too much strain.

I read a book called Poverty Safari: Understanding the Anger of Britain's Underclassby Darren McGarvey, and I recommend that anybody interested in understanding entrenched poverty read it. The author has lots of great quotes in the book, but one of them is "How do we solve poverty if all your jobs depend on it?". This is what we need to discuss. Whose jobs depend on poverty existing? We do have a poverty industry. We have an industry where poverty is profitable for other people and we must begin to address this. We cannot keep looking at individuals and asking why they are not coming out of poverty without looking at the systems and conditions that have created them in the first place.

It is not easy to live in a society where people, structures and policies are implicated in creating the conditions to allow poverty to exist. It is also not easy, though, to be able to challenge those if someone's life every day is based on the next decision about what happens that day. We think about how to pay a bill, and all these kinds of things, but poverty is so much bigger. It is so much more entrenched. We can change this situation. I have been in this Chamber for six years and people agree with me. They will nod their heads and they will agree, but nobody seems to take any responsibility for the fact that we are responsible for poverty. We make those decisions. People sit around tables and make decisions about how not to address poverty. This is why we need the Combat Poverty Agency.

For me, poverty is in direct opposition to human dignity. If the Government cannot afford people human dignity by ensuring their lives are ones worth living and that they can build futures worth having and if we can accept living in a society where some people do not have that chance while we do, then we really need to reflect on this situation. We must reflect on it and act radically. We must stop making cosmetic changes. We need to stop making small little welfare budget increases here and there, because this is cross-departmental. To do this, we must address what is inside ourselves. We are protecting the poverty industry. We are protecting policies that force people to die.

We always talk about the death count and the body count in circumstances such as pandemics, hurricanes, weather warnings and similar things that happen around the world. If we truly cared and understood the loss of life because of poverty, and poverty falls under the umbrella of Government policy and a lack of will and ambition to radically address poverty here, I would ask the question as to whether poverty benefits us and if we are willing to challenge this in ourselves. Have our careers, and those of many others, now come to rely on poverty? We must be able to stand up to this situation and radically address poverty in this country, because we are responsible.