Eamonn Kelly: The Blind Elite

Above from left: Minister for Housing Darragh O’Brien, Tanaiste Leo VaradkarTaoiseach Micheal Martin, Minister for the Environment, Climate and Communications Eamon Ryan at Government Buildings,Dublinlast week; Eamonn  Kelly

The week that was

By mid-week the taoiseach was insisting that FFG is not the “elite”, but were just ordinary Joes the same as everyone else. Which might well be true in terms of fry-ups on Saturdays and a pint at the weekend, but the salaries of our top politicians, like our top civil servants, particularly in comparison to the minimum wage, combined with the cost of housing, the cost of renting and the general cost of living, really seals the entire “elite” argument.

As politicians are often fond of saying, “The figures don’t lie.”

By Friday, the Irish Times, which isn’t elitist either, was running a very helpful article on the topic of Micheál Martin’s “Working Class Roots”, from behind a paywall.

But sure, everyone in Ireland has working class or farming roots. You don’t have to go back very far to find us all lurking in tenements or thatched cottages, back-biting the Lord of the Manor. But these days, since the measure of everything is money, Micheál and the rest are the elite, even if they don’t think they are.

The Meaning of a Job

A strange thing happened earlier in the week. The Tánaiste, Leo Varadkar, a neo-liberal, asked employers to raise wages to help staff to meet rising living costs. Now why would he do that?

One reason could be that unless wages are realistic in terms of living costs, the idea of a job itself is hopelessly undermined.

The idea of a job has already been seriously undermined by the pandemic, since it became clear that the “oceans of money sloshing around out there” that millionaires are often heard referring to, does actually exist, and it is not being translated into realistic wages that can allow a worker to buy a house.

Distraction

But there are other reasons why the Tánaiste would be concerned about the idea of a job being undermined. It is that the idea of a job, as a moral imperative, an idea mainly imported from the United States, of having the ability to “hold down a job”, is often used as a distraction by neo-liberals to further the larger project of rolling back the welfare state.

Politically, the idea of a job, as already demonstrated by Leo Varadkar with the welfare cheats campaign, can have the effect of dividing workers, along with providing cover for the transfer of public services into private hands.

Remote Working

The idea of a job was further challenged when the hope of remote working, which could have helped towards alleviating pressure on the climate, was essentially closed down as the elite worked to regain control of workers through the employer/worker relationship.

So even despite the so-called “great resignation” in the US, when US workers found that their jobs, in terms of a life choice, often didn’t make sense; combined with the possibility of environmental budgeting in terms of lessening traffic, the idea of remote working was dashed.

The new legislation that might have seen a more progressive and environmental way of incorporating remote working into the idea of a job, was instead rigged to give the employer the opportunity to deny the whole idea on various convenient get-outs.

Propaganda

On Thursday RTÉ ran a story by Conor Hunt basically saying that Irish people “don’t want to work”, the story being about delays in hiring staff from outside the EU. The angle worked was to elicit guilt, bringing up staff shortages in nursing homes.

Everywhere, it seemed, the establishment entities were essentially playing the same tune of getting workers back in line, while freshly enforcing the morality of “having a job”, regardless of how out of touch with living costs wages might be.

Past Crimes

Also on Thursday, Fintan O’Toole was saying how he couldn’t vote for Sinn Féin because he couldn’t forget the atrocities committed. I’m near the same age as Fintan and I remember those atrocities too, and they do give me pause for thought. It’s all very disturbing.

But I also remember the Ansbacher tax swindle by the upper middle-classes of Ireland. No doubt the same clientele has made alternative arrangements for tax avoidance. I remember Charlie Haughey’s Charvet shirts, and the culture of the brown envelope; and Ray Burke, and Liam Lawlor, and Pee Flynn’s second house, and all the tribunals that only ever seemed to benefit the legal fraternity; and Enda Kenny blaming the financial collapse on ordinary people for going overboard during the boom, and so on.

The Blind Elite

The problem with the Irish elite is that it doesn’t see itself as an elite. We’re “ordinary” is the catch-all cry. And yet the share of life chances and opportunities and educational advantages and salaries do not bear this out.

Because “ordinary” these days, for most people, especially the young, is minimal life chances, minimal educational opportunities, maximum rents and minimum wages. Working a full-time job and spending half your earnings on accommodation to a greedy elitist landlord, squeezing the last drop from every miserable asset.

A system where everyone clamours and compromises and remains schtum in an attempt to be “good”, and to hopefully find a niche in the elite’s world.

Russians

The Russians responded to Irish requests to take their training exercises out of our economic zone and not be upsetting the fish. The Russians did so, as a gesture of good will. Does this mean that the initial encroachment was a gesture of bad will?

They possibly see us basically as a kind of little USA. And with good reason. We don’t believe in public services or taxing the wealthy, all the major US companies live here, and our homeless figures are very competitive per capita with the big boys.

Eamonn Kelly is a Galway-based  freelance Writer and Playwright.

Previously: Eamonn Kelly on Broadsheet

RollingNews

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