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New Resource
Out of the Depths

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Buying in
Opting out

IT’S 8.30AM and the primary school in a town near Dublin is about to open. Several buses pull up – all full. The children are not coming from home but from crèches, where some have been since 6.30am. After school, the buses return them to the crèche until their parents collect them late in the day. Such are the lifestyles of the offspring of what economist David McWilliams has christened “the Pope’s children.”

The Republic of Ireland is a miracle – economically speaking, that is. With a general election in the offing, the good times continue to role. The rugby team and even the cricket team are doing well, and for the sports fan the only cloud on the horizon is the performance of the national soccer team. There has been more than a decade of economic prosperity, political stability, net immigration, large-scale population growth and near full employment. The secret is, depending on who you ask, social partnership agreements, a low tax regime for multi-national corporations, a highly educated and young population or some mix of the above.

Whatever the reasons, the candidates out on the canvass will find that the top issues on many people’s agendas are health care, education and quality of life. For some, though by no means all, social inclusion issues will also be on the agenda.

The public health service is rarely out of the news. The queues at A&E are legendary. Sometimes they stretch into days. Patients awaiting admission for surgery are routinely re-scheduled, two, three, four or more times. A surgeon reports turning up for his Monday operating list to find that not one of the patients on his list had been admitted to the hospital. He spent his day doing paperwork instead. Disorganisation and a lack of strategic co-ordination were to be resolved with the development of a new Health Service Executive. But three years on progress has been tortuously slow. Huge economic investment in health has not brought the promised transformation. A nurses’ work to rule is ongoing. Wrangling with consultants over new contracts has gone on for years. Now the plans of the present Minister for Health to develop private hospitals in the grounds of public hospitals have become an ideological row.

The issue only seems to highlight an already significant divide between those who have private health insurance and those who rely on the public service. There have been well-documented cases of people who died simply because they could not get timely access to needed treatment. A recent report from the Health Consumer Powerhouse ranks Ireland between 23rd and 26th of all EU countries in terms of health care provision¹. Given the present wealth of the country this is a shocking statistic.

In education, population growth has led to severely overcrowded schools, and the building of new schools has not kept up. Reductions in pupil-teacher ratios in the nineties have now been lost, and Ireland has the second-highest class sizes in Europe with over a quarter of primary school children in classes of greater than 30². Even at that, many parents are in despair because they simply cannot find a place for their children in any school.

Significant efforts have been made to accommodate immigrant children, many with poor or no English, in schools. Language assistants have been appointed, and the government recently lifted a cap on the number of assistants a school can hire. Nonetheless, one education official says that the scene in many classrooms is reminiscent of the Tower of Babel. And language difficulties are not the only ones pupils face. Many come to Ireland suffering the effects of long-term poverty and emotional trauma. They may have left a parent or other siblings living in their country of origin and often have little hope of seeing the family reunited.

Education deficits are being tackled. Outreach programmes seek to help early school-leavers. Election promises of hiring up to 4,000 new teachers are being made. The number of people in full-time third level education has doubled since 1990³. Many adults who missed out on a proper education in their youth are taking advantage of a myriad of adult education schemes and incentives.

In less prosperous times Irish people put a high value on relationships as a measure of quality of life. The traditional close Irish family and strongly knit local communities were at the heart of Irish life. Divorce was not available until 1997, and rates of marital breakdown were extremely low by European standards. Women were strongly encouraged to stay at home once children arrived, and many never returned to the workplace. The booming economy has transformed that picture. Extraordinarily high house prices coupled with very low unemployment have left couples with no option but for both partners to work full-time to fund the mortgage. House prices have forced many to buy a home far from their place of work; hence the long hours of commuting and children spending all their waking hours outside of their home.

The effect has been a serious decline in quality of life for many. One of the most popular television programmes of late on RTE was “Families in Trouble,” a reality TV show where a psychologist helps parents unable to cope with their children’s behaviour. The rate of marital breakdown has increased fivefold in the last 20 years. Suicide rates and the number of people being treated for depression are both at all-time highs.

Quality of life for the “new Irish” is also a mixed bag. Relaxation of immigration policies has given many of the refugees who arrived here in the last decade a chance to settle permanently and begin to build a new life for themselves. Given the scale of the immigration, the number of incidents of racial tension is relatively low, but there is plenty of anecdotal evidence of people being targeted and mistreated because of their race. Individual families are targeted, houses have been damaged, and the housing of too many immigrant families in one estate has produced a strong reaction from “native” residents.

Reflecting on these trends from a biblical perspective, there are causes for both worry and celebration. In caring for those who are disadvantaged, the government has made significant progress. A recent report by the Combat Poverty Agency said that the Irish Government was ahead of many of its counterparts in ensuring that plans to tackle poverty and develop social inclusion were becoming an integrated part of government policy⁴. However, the Conference of Religious in Ireland’s Policy Briefing on poverty criticised the new anti-poverty plan saying it ignored the “working poor”⁵.

In areas of greatest social need, much progress has been made. Finance has been committed to community regeneration projects. There is a recognition that throwing money at social deprivation will not solve it, and community development partnerships have become the normal working model. Work is going on among new immigrant communities to encourage entrepreneurs, among single fathers to help develop their parenting skills, among people who have family members on drugs and in a myriad of other areas.

But serious problems remain. One community worker in Dublin’s inner city tells of grandparents challenging their children in the courts for custody of the grandchildren because the children’s parents are heroin addicts. There are significant difficulties for many in the travelling community who struggle to achieve recognition as an ethnic group with a valid culture and lifestyle of its own.

There is also a growing understanding of the need to develop a concept of civic responsibility to replace the more traditional commitment to institutions such as the parish and the local GAA club. Various surveys have found a continuing commitment to volunteer activity in Irish society, even in a period of economic prosperity.

But there are also factors that are worrying signs for the future. A culture of philanthropy has yet to develop among the growing number of seriously wealthy Irish people. In many cases, the culture still encourages taking as much and giving as little as possible. Urban planning has failed to create new communities, and developers build estates of hundreds of housing units without a single shop, school, doctor’s surgery, community centre, sports facility or even a pub. A culture of increasing individualism is only strengthened when people simply have no place where they can engage with their neighbours.

Added to increasing individualism is the trend to look to government to resolve all problems. Recently a heavy morning fog led to a motorway pile-up near Dublin. A failure to drive at appropriate speed was clearly the cause, but on the evening news there were calls for the government to “do something” about the issue. Personal responsibility is not a popular term and civic or social responsibility is a concept that will require significant developing in the years ahead.

Those children arriving at their schools from their crèche have a hopeful but uncertain future. They will certainly spend a lot less time with their parents in a home environment than their parents spent with their grandparents. And they will find themselves compensated with the latest gadgets and holidays abroad.

A Scripture based response from churches could begin with tackling the problem of the idolatry of the economy. Everything here is measured in monetary terms. “Quality of life” has become synonymous with how much disposable income you have. A community of faith that refuses to “buy in” to this view of life will have an impact. Modelling a way of life that refuses to bow the knee to the god of economic prosperity is the first step. Encouraging families to make do with less so that one parent can be at home for the children will be subversive these days. So let’s be subversive! Envisioning, training and resourcing church people can help them become catalysts for community formation and development in their local area. Providing practical help and support for those whom the rising tide is sinking rather than lifting is also crucial.

Above all, churches must refuse to surrender the responsibility for personal and community formation to its elected representatives.⁶ “Why don’t they do something?” must be replaced by “What is the something that God wants to do here through us?”

The general election will yield few surprises. Whatever the make-up of the next coalition government there will be no great variation in social economic policy. Given the unprecedented scale of change the Republic of Ireland can be justifiably proud of its developments. The challenge that lies ahead is the building of a just society which provides opportunity for all and expects commitment from all for the common good.

SEÁN MULLAN is General Director of Evangelical Alliance Ireland and Church Team Leader at Dublin West Community Church.

1Euro Health Consumer Index 2006 at healthpowerhouse.com/media/RaportEHCI2006en.pdf

2 Statement by John Carr, General Secretary, Irish National Teachers’ Organisation, “On Class Sizes in Primary School”, 5 February 2007. http://www.into.ie/ROI/Downloads/frontpagedownloads/filedownload,4965,en.doc

3 Source: Central Statistics Office Ireland. http://www.cso.ie/statistics/per_full_time_edu.htm.

4 Jamie Smyth, “Government's efforts to combat poverty praised in report on EU” The Irish Times, 22 March 2007. http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/ireland/2007/0322/1174492285841.html

5March 2007 at http://www.cori.ie/justice/publications/briefing/poverty_07/index.htm

6 The Social Justice Working Group of Evangelical Alliance Ireland produced a publication entitled Vote Wisely, as a way of helping evangelical Christians think biblically on a range of political issues in the run up to the May 2007 general election in the Republic.

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