Politics

At the INOU’s recent Annual Delegate Conference delegates called on the Government to “significantly increase Jobseeker payments – at a minimum to the rates in early 2009 – including reversing the cuts to younger jobseekers”. This call was made in recognition of the financial difficulties facing unemployed people. It reflected that the poverty rates experienced by unemployed people are considerably higher than the national average. According to the most recent Survey on Income and Living Conditions (SILC) 2014, unemployed people’s at risk of poverty rate was 35.9% in comparison to the national figure of 16.3%. Their deprivation rate was 53.4% in comparison to a national figure of 29%. Their consistent poverty rate was 22.6% in comparison to a national figure of 8%. One goal of the National Action Plan for Social Inclusion 2007-2016, related to income support, was to: “Maintain the relative value of the lowest social welfare rate at least at €185.80, in 2007 terms, over the course of this Plan, subject to available resources”.Currently the Basic Social Welfare Allowance is €186. However, if this goal had been adhered to, the Basic Social Welfare Allowance would be €191.77, a gure that would still be below the SILC 2014 ‘at risk of poverty threshold’ by €18.34. In their report on Minimum Essential Standard of Living, the Vincentian Partnership for Social Justice noted: “The data show that working age households without dependant children are also experiencing income inadequacy when dependent on social welfare”. They added that: “The single adult household faces income inadequacy of €63 per week, despite receiving Rent Supplement and the full rate of Jobseekers”. Restoring working-age social welfare payments to 2009 levels would go some way to addressing these issues and would alleviate poverty among the unemployed. The introduction of age segregation in the Jobseekers Allowance payments was discriminatory. The INOU strongly believes that they should be reversed on equality grounds. The Vincentian Partnership for Social Justice noted that “The cost of a Minimum Essential Standard of Living for an unemployed young adult living in the family home is €154 per week, more than one and a half times the reduced rate of Job Seekers Allowance for adults aged 18 to 24 [of €100]”. There are strong social inclusion and anti-poverty grounds for this practice of age segregation to be ended and the situation of young job seekers restored. The commitment in the Programme for Government to “develop the process of budget and policy proofing as a means of advancing equality, reducing poverty and strengthening economic and social rights” should drive change in the discrimination against young people in the Job Seekers Allowance. There are anomalies in the social protection system that cause difficulties for unemployed people and their families. As the economy begins to recover it is important that these anomalies are addressed. This would be in keeping with the Programme for Government’s aspiration that, “at the same time, economic repair must be complemented by social repair”. A motion at the INOU’s Annual Delegate Conference called on the Government to “fully restore the Christmas bonus and to facilitate access to this payment for people who are unemployed for at least 12 months, i.e. when they are deemed to be long-term unemployed rather than the current access point of 15 months”. There was also a call to restore the duration of Jobseekers Benefit to 12 and 9 months from the current maximum durations of 9 and 6 months depending on the recipient’s PRSI contributions. These are issues that must be addressed in Budget 2017. The Programme for Government made a commitment to “develop a new Integrated Framework for Social Inclusion, which will outline measures to help eliminate any persisting discrimination on grounds of gender, age, family status, marital status, sexual orientation, race, disability, religion or membership of the Traveller Community”. If this commitment is to be inclusive of unemployed people it is necessary for a new equality ground to be introduced in our equality legislation. Currently the ground of socio-economic status is noticeable by its absence. The current situation of unemployed people makes this urgent. The INOU has urged the Government to ensure that Budget 2017 plays its part in securing a better future for people who are unemployed, living with a disability, parenting alone, living in communities that rarely experience economic growth or facing discrimination because, for example, of their age or their ethnicity.; and for communities that are living on the margins of Irish society. This would be a practical expression of the stated ambition of the Government when launching the Programme for Government, in stating that “at its core is a simple objective: to make people’s lives better in every part of Ireland”.   Brid O’Brien is Head of Policy and Media with the Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed.

We struggle in the consumerist war-free West with the other, with Strangers. When someone with a credit card and pale skin settles in another land we often hear them referred to as an ‘expat’. Others permanently abroad are deemed ‘migrants’, ‘illegals’ or ‘asylum-seekers’. Few of us have direct experience of the conflicts that devour post-colonial states, where diffuse identities and profound inequality fuel endless conflicts which displace innocents, and sometimes not-so-innocents: humanity in its manifold complexity. But not only wars push a person to leave home: malnutrition still afflicts almost a billion; climate change will drive drought, flooding and disease; many of us are pulled simply by an evolutionary urge to improve our lot. The legal definition of a refugee as a person fleeing conflict or persecution is archaic and unfair on migrants and host nations; it takes no account of internal displacement or the soon-to-be-felt-impact of ecological wreckage. Migrants have understandably used the process as a way of bypassing dead-end legal channels, and who would blame them? But most of those forming the recent five-million-strong Syrian exodus fall squarely inside the legal definition of a refugee. Many Europeans shudder at this unprecedented encounter. Alone among politicians Angela Merkel has shown moral leadership, perhaps informed by a Christian ethos, even if she has wavered and in the end apologised. Nonetheless, civil society (especially in Western Europe) has displayed a remarkable generosity. Up to now the Irish State has responded to ‘the problem’ with the banal savagery of Direct Provision where asylum-seekers are denied employment and cooking facilities, and live on a pittance. In response to the Syrian exodus, in contrast to the charity and sympathy of most Irish citizens, the Irish State has been painfully slow at fulfilling its public commitment to take four thousand, itself derisory; the Department of Justice claim that 870 will be resettled by the end of the year. We may speculate that there is a fear in government circles that they will eventually be ‘punished’ for favouring the foreigner over the indigenous Irish; and perhaps there is a calculation that compassion will easily dissipate in the event of any problematic integration of a predominantly Muslim population. We might attribute the present moral muddle to a post-modernit world where we have difficulty determining Significance, especially against a background of declining appreciation of the narratives contained in sacred traditions. Insignificance, according to Milan Kundera in his last novel ‘The Festival of Insignificance’, has become “the essence of existence. It is all around us, and everywhere and always. It is present even when no one wants to see it: in horror, in bloody battles, in the worst disasters”. For understandable reasons, many consider religion a dirty word identified with a patriarchy where women’s bodies have emerged as a key battleground. But the philosopher Richard Kearney in his book ‘Anatheism [Returning to God after God]’ (2010) proposes “the possibility of a third way beyond the extremes of dogmatic theism and militant atheism: those polar opposites of certainty that have maimed so many minds and souls in our history”. Similarly, as the Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer awaited execution in a Nazi concentration camp for his apparent participation in the plot to kill Hitler, he proposed a reformed Christianity after the “Death of God” heralded by Nietzsche, Freud and totalitarianism. He wrote: “The God of religion, of metaphysics and of subjectivity is dead; the place is vacant for the preaching of the cross and for the God of Jesus Christ”. To Kearney: “Christianity thus becomes not an invitation to another world but a call back to this one, a robust and challenging ‘Christianity of this world’, a secular faith that sees the weakness of God as precisely a summons to the rekindled strength of humanity”. This is a call for compassion where we set aside our selfish desires. Kearney finds in the Abrahamic faiths as well as in Eastern traditions valuable responses to the alien stranger. Thus Jacob sees the face of God in his mortal enemy: “The message is this: the divine, as exile, is in each human other who asks to be received in our midst”. He recalls a Passover prayer: “You shall not oppress a stranger, having yourself been strangers in the land of Egypt”. Kearney contends that: “The very fact that the Lord must repeatedly enjoin justice to prevent hatred of the foreign is itself an acknowledgement that initial responses to aliens are more likely to be fear than love”. He acknowledges that “for every Francis of Assisi there is an Inquisition and for every Saint James, a Jim Jones”, but points to the Golden Rule to treat ‘thy neighbour as thyself’ found in almost all faith traditions – which demands hospitality to the outsider. We may easily wash our hands of responsibility for that alien other. The welcome of an unknown person is surely irrational, or we can imagine the possibility of an encounter with “the divine as exile,” and overcome any fears. Kearney acknowledges, however, that there are “limits to hospitality, at least for finite beings”. A particular challenge to our hospitality lies in a prevailing distaste for the Islamic faith from which is drawn most of the Syrian exodus, and which has been tainted by association with terrorism, especially after the 9/11 atrocities. Since the 1970s in the Middle East and elsewhere political grievances are often articulated through a resurgent Islam. This is in contrast to Christianity which has faded from politics, at least in Europe, mostly surviving in conservative forms that have little in common with Bonhoeffer’s idea of a “Christianity of this world”, or the early voices of Liberation Theology in Catholicism. The example of the Prophet Muhammad who began the conquest of an empire is quite different from that of Jesus Christ who demanded that his disciples put down their swords at the critical moment of his arrest. But Christianity also draws on an Old Testament replete with savagery and the wide-ranging Islamic corpus contains many teachings complementary to the

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