On my way in to work I pass beggars with their babies, and women in furs going into boutiques to collect dresses that have been flown in from England. I could buy a mackerel on the way for 25p, or I could buy handmade chocolates. I pass chip shops and dining clubs, brasseries and hermetic pubs, vegetable stalls and gourmet delicatessens.
In the bank this morning, the man in front of me in the queue was the cart-pusher, who comes along the gutter in the morning vaguely trailing his sweeping-brush. The woman behind is famous for her dinner parties. Each thing is part of the whole: privilege and poverty all in an intimate, intricate mix together.
Even the people most trapped in ghettos – the very rich, the too-famous-to-go-out, the very poor – know what the others do, and a little bit about what it’s like. There’s bound to be a relative somewhere whose condition is quite different from the rest of the family’s. Even politicians, who never travel on a bus, meet an awful lot of people who never travel in a car. You can’t really seal yourself into just one way of life here. Other people keep breaking in.
RTÉ television shows ads for expensive toys, and at the same time shows scenes of deprivation from home and from abroad. The Irish Times talks about champagne and golden baubles, and also talks about the homeless and malnourished and hopeless. The mix reflects the way things are. It wouldn’t make sense, to most people, to censor affluence because of guilt about misery. Not only are a lot of people in actual fact comfortable enough: in actual fact, that is what everybody aspires to be. Having money is cheerful and exciting. Who ever wanted as badly to be poor?
But it jars, the mix. It jars, the silk lingerie alongside the itinerants. It is just not okay to come out of a shop with your parcels and stumble across a glue-sniffing child. Whatever there is left in us of a desire for social justice, even if it is no more than a persistent unease, comes alive at Christmastime. You make yourself conscious of your own good fortune by conjuring up what the opposite would be – what it would be like if you had no home or if you lost the children or if nobody wanted you.
Ordinary people don’t know why things are as they are. They don’t know how it comes about that some are fortunate and some are not. They feel themselves to be individually compassionate – they would make things better for other people if they could. But they see no route from themselves to the general good. They don’t know what to do, except be charitable.
In theory, that is what politics are for. We are an electoral democracy and we can use the ballot to express, through legislation, the will of the people. In practice, this is not how politics in this country is perceived. People grasp that they can elect politicians, and choose between the persons offered to them. They can even elect parties. But the connection between party and policy has long since been lost, at least in the Center and on the Right. Nobody even listens to what politicians say before an election. And after an election, what power have the people then? If we were asked, for instance, by referendum, whether we want the recommendations of the Commission on Social Welfare implemented, I have no doubt that we would say that we most certainly do. But no government implements them. Something stops them: the size of the task, or the Department of Finance or, for all I know, the International Monetary Fund. We really have no way of making the government’s priorities the same as our own.
And leaving politics aside, most people don’t know anything about economics. They see no connection between their own good fortune and the bad fortune of others. Nobody ever points out any connection, except in the line of making them feel guilty. But they don’t want to feel guilty, and they don’t believe they are guilty. They’re glad that they’re safe and warm and have money to spend, and they really, really don’t understand why someone mightn’t have worked for five years, or why a single mother would trap herself with more than one baby, or why a poor man would spend his whole dole money on drink.
If it were clear to people that mortgage tax relief, for instance, or private schools, are in fact connected with the despair of the underprivileged, they might allow their moral sensibility to open up to those things. But they’re trapped in little pieces of information, and anecdotal knowledge, and a view of the poor based on the cleaning woman.
Yet, if asked, of course everybody would say that they want things to be better, that they don’t want anybody to suffer; that of course they don’t want itinerant children to burn to death in a field of mud; of course they don’t want teenagers exploited in low-paid jobs; of course they don’t want there to be women who can only get through Christmas on Valium.
And it’s not just because it’s more comfortable for yourself if everybody around you is comfortable. It is because – in my opinion, anyway – people would much rather be good than bad. And they have an idea of the good, which derives from Christianity, and it has to do with other people. The thing that baffles them is, how do you get from here to there? How can one person, in one life, move a whole society toward social justice?
Can there be any kind of plan? But then do people at heart believe in planning? At Christmas you notice more than any other time how great the role the accidental and the random play in the individual life. There are going to be people who are dreadfully unhappy this week and all by accident, through no fault of their own or ours, nothing to do with money, even. That your lover left, or the daughter moved to Australia, or all the old neighbors are gone. It is known by everybody that even leaving aside the big things, like whether we have good health, or when we die, the way our lives work out is essentially ungovernable. This is never mentioned as a factor in political culture. Some politics depend on the notion of steady progress toward an achievable goal. But, deep down, people don’t believe that events can be made as orderly as that. So those politics appear unreal, and that in turn affects their chance of success.
It goes against the grain of experience to believe that general reform is possible all at once, or that it can be brought about increment by increment, with everybody knowing where they’re going. But piecemeal, minor reforms are within our grasp. One family can look after one other, less fortunate, family. One pressure group can establish a need, and struggle to meet it: think back ten years ago, there was no one to help the victims of rape. Twenty years ago there was no single parent’s allowance. A hundred years ago there was no alternative to the workhouse. Obviously things do get better, even if it is obscure to most of us how it is that they get better, or when the exact moment of change is, or what are the ideas that eventually move in from the edges and become the center.
It seems reasonable, if not to believe, then to hope that things will continue, bit by bit, to improve. That there might be a Christmas when there will be less to hurt the conscience.
We’re hardly going to go on, are we, letting the number of our homeless grow and grow? Or are we? Is it endemic to our economic system that an underclass must develop, and that we must harden our hearts?
The Irish Times, December 18, 1989