Economy

Our new Taoiseach Leo Varadkar TD makes sure he gets out once a week, often to see a movie. Last year he went to see the English movie ‘I Daniel Blake’ directed by Mike Leigh. Discussing the movie at a Pobal conference he showed little sympathy for the plight of Daniel who, having suffered a heart attack at work, was forced to reply on job seekers payments while attempting to appeal a decision not to allow him  a disability payment.  Nor did he appear significantly moved by single mother Katie and her children (Daisy and Dylan). Katie, having moved to Newcastle from a London homeless persons’ hostel, and increasingly desperate to survive, resorted to  food banks, shoplifting, and work in a brothel. Indeed he has since gone out of his way to affirm his belief in the heavy-handed ‘work-first’ policy message at the heart of UK welfare reform. Through a rhetoric of ‘welfare cheats’ and an election campaign that spoke to the “coping classes”, the “people who get up in the morning” he has consciously sought to replicate an anti-welfare rhetoric in Irish political discourse.  The question we must now ask is whether, under his new emboldened leadership, the bleak lives of Daniel and Katie, dominated by a hostile welfare state, could happen here.  Are we seeing conditions emerge for ‘I, Dónal Blake?. The Irish welfare state has recently played catch-up to new forms of globalisation,  privatisation, marketisation and voguish new public management (NPM) and has, championed by both international and domestic actors,  moved towards work-first activation  which is  a more active use of income support to promote participation in paid employment.  It is a mixture of enabling, compensation and regulatory regimes, but the general international trend has been  for policy, and managerial, reforms to undermine potentially enabling elements and intensify its regulatory and punitive elements.  Pathways to Work (PTW),  Ireland’s activation policy,  has fundamentally restructured Ireland’s activation institutions and programmes,  rolling back old institutions like FÁS and rolling out new institutions like Intreo, the pay-by-results private-sector Job Path, and the Social Inclusion Community Activation Programme which has reoriented local community-development work towards supporting job readiness.  New penalties have been introduced and, while the incidence of sanctions is still comparatively low,  the unemployed have heard the message clearly. There is a new regime in town which must be engaged. Activation is often associated with recommodification of labour and mobilisation of a new form of ‘floating’, or more available and flexible employee,  where claimants are gauged by their ‘standby-ability’ and live in a condition of flex-insecurity. We can best understand what activation is for by asking activation ‘into what’. The crisis also saw increased incidences of low pay and more precarious working conditions.  Low pay is an increasing feature of the Irish labour market, with up to 30% of Irish workers low-paid according to the OECD definition of two thirds the industrial wage. Some groups of people are more likely to be low-paid, with women, young people and migrants not only more likely to be in low-paid work but also to work involuntarily part-time, to be underemployed or to  be in precarious forms of employment. The Irish state spends over €1bn  in in-work benefits to support low-paid workers and their families,  compensation mechanisms that supports participation in low paid employment ultimately act as forms of corporate welfare, supporting not only low-paid workers but ultimately making such low-paid work viable. Taken together then, recent Irish changes point to a work-first policy strategy with a greater use of privatised actors working in  a more managerial culture and using more  regulatory sanctions to pressurise working-aged claimants into low-paid and precarious employment.  That this work is often only viable through compensation in the form of in-work and employer subsidies raises questions about the quality of employment people can aspire to and whether in fact paid employment offers a sustainable route out of poverty.  There is an alternative and it includes  longer-term ‘preventative’ measures including properly accredited and quality education and training and regulating for decent jobs and living wages. One desirable recent change is the inclusion of Employment in the remit of the old Department of Social Protection.  We need to judge success not by movement from welfare into work, but movement into lasting, sustainable and decent employment.  If the new Taoiseach wishes to avoid a dystopian future or ‘I Dónal Blake’ situation  he might look to addressing low pay as a significant Irish labour market phenomenon and introduce policy initiatives that counter a ‘low hours’ employment culture.  People want jobs and to ‘get up in the morning’ but need a combination of institutional and income support responses to unemployment that reverse the emerging reality where approximately 30 percent of Irish workers experience not only low pay but also low hours of work, part-time work, temporary contracts and precarious working conditions.    By Micheál Collins and Mary Murphy

While the consequences of the UK’s decision to leave the EU remain unclear, one thing is certain – the power and influence Ireland, North and South, will exercise over the final decision-making is limited. The hype in May of this year over apparent ‘concessions’ gained by Ireland from the EU, about an early resolution to how the Irish border will be affected, was quickly rubbished by UK Brexit Secretary, David Davis. He and other English Tory politicians have made it clear that the UK’s self-interest goes beyond, and is much more important than, the concerns of those living either side of the Irish border, or indeed the Irish peace process. It is not even clear how the 27 remaining member states of the EU (of which the Irish State is only one) will actually approach negotiations with the UK, and whether they will indeed take the concerns of the Irish seriously. The Irish State has not been awarded a veto similar to the one apparently granted to Spain by the EU over any decisions on Gibraltar, in relation to the North or the Border. Indeed it is not clear that EU interests (if they exist collectively) are likely to coincide with Ireland’s when it comes to what will be a new EU land border with what will be a non-EU state. And if the Irish State will have limited power and influence over negotiations it is clear that the people of the North will have none at all. Despite a majority of the North’s population (56%) voting to Remain in June 2016, that voice has more or less been silenced by an overwhelming majority of English MPs in Westminster supportive of Brexit whose minds are concentrated on negotiating a deal that will suit their own constituencies. One option touted by some hopeful nationalist politicians is for the people in the North to vote for Irish reunification, in a referendum (allowable under the Belfast Agreement, 1998). David Davis accepted in March of this year that by joining an existing EU State (Ireland) the North could remain in the EU without having to reapply. However, while many Unionists, particularly in Border areas, voted against Brexit it’s not clear that this would translate into a vote for the ending of partition. The Northern Ireland entity was after all created in 1920 specifically to give Unionists a majority, where they had lacked one in the whole of Ireland. It is true that that majority has decreased in recent years. It is also true that in the Assembly elections in March 2017 the Unionist parties (for the first time since partition) did not win a majority of seats, but then neither did the Nationalist parties. There is also no guarantee that votes for the Nationalist parties would necessarily translate into votes for reunification, particularly if this led to the loss of the NHS, social services and public-sector jobs. Ironically, a Westminster Tory Government dedicated to rolling back the welfare state and public-sector cuts, might make that choice easier! In any event the British Government has refused to agree to a referendum in the North as it also has in Scotland, apparently fearful that this might lead to the break-up of the UK. The lack of control over its own destiny is not something new for Ireland of course. Though the North remained within the UK after the 1921 Treaty, the ‘independence’ of the Irish State in the South always seemed compromised, initially by economic dependence on Britain and then, from 1973 onwards, by EU membership and a progressive seepage of sovereignty to the EU and, in particular, its bigger states. The lack of democratic control over the economy in Ireland, North and South, became particularly clear during the banking crisis and the period of austerity. While the experience of the crisis and austerity was different, North and South, reflecting different social, economic, and political contexts, as well as different forms of democratic control, it nonetheless showed that power lay elsewhere. The 2008 global economic crisis and the responses to it in the industrialised rich countries of the world led not just to a re-moulding of capitalism, but to increased clarity about both the lack of global democracy and what John Pilger termed in 2002, “the new rulers of the world”. Neoliberal minimalist State regulation of financial institutions, and the economy in general, was replaced by high-State interventionist ‘austerity’ measures, aimed at protecting capitalist financial structures. In the EU, Governments nationalised private debt, spreading the costs across their local communities, largely to ensure that capitalism as an economic structure and ideology was maintained. The notion of ‘European-ness’ and a sense of a unified EU citizenship – used to promote the idea of a greater social and economic union from the 1970s – gave way to single-State self-interest as the bigger economies banded together to protect their national interests and the interests of their banks and their bondholders. Smaller EU states, having progressively relinquished sovereignty to the larger states, from Maastricht (1992) to the Euro (2002) to Lisbon (2007) in the interests of ‘Europeanisation’, realised that they no longer controlled their own economies, budgets or fiscal arrangements. Ideological choices appeared limited in smaller states – either accept the new ‘austerity’ measures, enthusiastically, as the only solution to a global crisis, or accept them, reluctantly. What Greece’s former Finance Minister, Yanis Varoufakis, was to call, “financial terrorism” was in town. Irish Governments from 2008 on fitted in with that ‘austerity’ agenda accepting with enthusiastic energy the dominant agenda of public-sector cuts. Although the capitulation to threats from the IMF and the EU seemed to show a lack of democratic control, they still had a choice, even if it was simply to raise a protest at the way their State was being treated. A ‘pragmatic’ approach to the powerful seemed the best option and by and large the approach fitted with the world view of the main parties. Up until 2015, the North of Ireland had not suffered

In the acknowledgement section of philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s last major book, he thanked his editorial assistant for a “pertinent critique” of the draft work. As he was then finishing up working for Ricoeur, in 2014, that editorial assistant, fresh-faced Emmanuel Macron, professed himself “like an excited child at the end of a show”. Macron, now French President, has shown more leadership than the entire rest of the Western world since his election. He claims to have found a political path between left and right, has made clear in the most elegant ways his disdain for Trump and has bowed to nobody, least of all Vladimir Putin in sharing truths about international political thuggery. So it is interesting to trace his philosophic influences. For Ricoeur, phronesis, Aristotle’s term practical wisdom, is the tool we bring to bear on political or social puzzles. There is no single method and it does not flow not from a universal moral code but instead from leading an ethical life. In 1969 when he learned that a group of student radicals was committed to preventing professors enter the cafeteria at the University of Nanterre, then a refuge for radical leftists from the University of the Sorbonne, to which he had just been appointed a professor, Ricoeur nevertheless walked into the room in the hope of dialogue. However, one of the students placed a dustbin lid on Ricoeur’s head. This cameo grimly illustrates what Ricoeur called the fragility of politics.   The week before the recent French Presidential Macron talked – and listened – to a crowd of angry workers at a tumble-dryer factory in Amiens, northern France, threatened with closure by June 2018. Greeted by whistles and calls of “Marine for president” when he arrived, by the time he left Macron had, if not completely convinced his audience, at least ended the jeers – and won some respect. “I’m not sure he can truly help us” one striking employee was reported as saying. “But he tried. He was quiet and honest”. It was a dustbin initiative. It was more ethical than the actions of most politicians in similar circumstances.   For Ricoeur, integrity can be judged by our attachment to the promises we make to ourselves and to others.   Distinguishing himself from Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the extreme left Defiant France, Macron declared: “I will not promise that I will nationalize your factory. The answer to what is happening is not to suppress globalisation or close the borders. Do not be fooled by those who tell you otherwise. They are lying to you. Unhappily, there will always be companies that fail”. When a worker demanded to know what Macron would do as president, he vowed that his government would invest heavily in retraining programs for endangered industries. Hearing frustrated groans, Macron replied by telling the workers that he did not come to “promise the moon,” but instead that he would fight for them: “We all have responsibilities. If I did not respect your work, your fears, and your anger, I would not be here today”. He then made a final promise: “I will return, without cameras and even if I lose”. The recognition of the other’s singularity, the recognition that there are no simple solutions and that confrontations must become dialogues — creating a space, even in parking lots, where answers might not be found but questions will find respectful listeners — all reflect Ricoeur’s ethics. So, too, does Macron’s repeated invocation of promises, both those he would make — such as returning to Amiens to meet the workers — and those he would not, like Le Pen’s to keep Whirlpool’s operations in Amiens.   In an essay titled ‘Existence and Hermeneutics’ Ricoeur claims he is striving for a philosophy which can describe and engage with the various ways that people make sense of their worlds. He wants a philosophy which can arbitrate the claims which different world views, each a philosophy in its own right, will present. Ricoeur proposes hermeneutics, the art/science of interpretation, as a model for the philosophy he desires. This he defines as the art or science of interpreting texts where more than one meaning is present.   Macron has famously formed his party, En Marche, and his government in equal measure from the left and the right, and – allegedly – from neither. He characteristically frames his vision with the famous formula “and at the same time”: For example addressing probably the most fractious issue in French politics he has said he wants to make work more flexible but at the same time protect the most vulnerable.   Ricoeur emphasises an ethic of responsibility, a sort of ‘practical wisdom’ seeking constantly to integrate actions with a sense of the consequences.   This would account for Macron’s strength on the issue of climate change. He berated Trump for his withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, in English, calling to make the planet great again; and he called on climate scientists disgruntled with Trump’s policies to help France with its efforts to arrest global warming.   Ricoeur struggles with the correlation between power and evil.   There is evidence Macron does not pull his punches. Who could deny that scrunching Trump’s tiny fist in a symbolic macho handshake was addressing evil used by power, head on, albeit in a banal way.   Ricoeur is Christian, utopian and idealistic. He thinks that politics should intersect with economics and ethics. One of the manifestations of this is strict honesty. After telling celebrated, fashionable psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in 1963 that he could not understand a word of his writings on Freud, Ricoeur became the bête noire of Lacan’s zealous followers. It was blunt and brave.   In the presence of the intimidating Vladimir Putin and in another “muscular exchange”, in May, Macron attacked Russian propaganda outlets, which he says do not practise journalism. “I will not give an inch on this”, he asserted. “Russia Today and Sputnik … behaved as