At stake in the broadband scheme is what Robert Watt, secretary general of the Department of Public Expenditure, has called in an official memo “the unprecedented risks associated with this project”.
When was the last time unprecedented risk turned into a disaster for the Irish taxpayer? A decade ago. Whose fingerprints were all over it?
KPMG.
And who devised the outrageous model at the heart of the NBP?
KPMG.
As of January, we have so far paid KPMG, one of the biggest consultancy and audit firms in the world, €11.33 million for work on the NBP.
This is the way public policy is formed in the State now.
Pro-life group Love Both’s campaign to keep the Eighth Amendment
The claim that 90 per cent of babies diagnosed with Down’s Syndrome in Britain are aborted is not inaccurate but it is rather misleading.
What it leaves out is the very large number of women – between 30 and 40 per cent – who choose not to be screened for DS because they have already decided that even if the test were positive they would continue with the pregnancy anyway.
In Holland, only 35 per cent of women choose to be screened. Prof Eva Pajkrt, co-author of a Dutch study, told the Oireachtas committee on the Eighth Amendment:
“We asked women their reasons. One reason was that many women in the Netherlands felt that Down syndrome was not something we should screen for. I think that reflects our way of counselling women and giving them their own choice. Our healthcare is based on patient autonomy and what women want.”
Choice operates both ways – some women choose abortion, some choose to raise a child with DS.
…The choice to continue with a DS pregnancy is made, not in the abstract, but in real life. Anti-abortion campaigners claim that the Eighth Amendment has made Ireland a lovely place to have a DS child.
Love Both’s pamphlet says of DS that “we have a culture of equality and inclusion that we can be proud of”. Senator Rónán Mullen claims, “We have a tradition here in Ireland where children with Down syndrome are perhaps more cherished than in many other countries.”
That would be the DS children who wait two years for a wheelchair or three years for language therapy. That would be Ireland whose grand total of DS clinical nurse specialists is precisely one – and she’s paid by a charity, not by the State.
“I am one of the eejits who paid the water charges, not because I was ever less than apoplectic at the antics of Irish Water’s superbly entitled bosses, but because I’m sick of living in a supposedly developed country where people have to boil tap water to make it drinkable and where raw sewage pours into the sea.
“And I don’t want my money back. I don’t want a cheque to frame as souvenir of my own eejitry.
…What I would like is that instead of being the last act in a long-running farce that made a mockery of our democracy, the money we paid be used for a decent democratic experiment. There’s €178 million in a pot and the Government has decided that it belongs to those who paid their water charges. So let us (and us alone) decide collectively how to spend it.
One of these options would, of course, be simply to pay the money back to the individual householders.
…But I suspect most people would be much happier to see their money used to achieve something.
Fintan O’Toole in The Irish Times on July 25, 2017
Three of Ireland’s best-known charities have agreed to join forces and form a national campaign to ask the Irish public to consider donating their refunds from Irish Water to tackle the national homelessness crisis in Ireland.
Simon Community, Focus Ireland and Peter McVerry Trust are planning a major national fundraising campaign to coincide with the upcoming Irish Water national repayment scheme which will see €173 million handed back to almost one million account holders over the coming months.
The 3 charities intend to launch “The Refund Project” – a national advertising and public information campaign asking people who can afford to donate, to consider the plight of Ireland’s over 8000 people who are homeless, more than 3000 of which are children. The new group say that even a fraction of the total repayments could help make an enormous difference in the delivery of much needed housing.
Kitty Holland, of The Irish Times; Denis O’Brien, owner of Communicorp
Last night.
At the Gate Theatre, Dublin.
Further to Denis O’Brien-owned Communicorp – which includes Newstalk and Today FM – banning all Irish Times journalists from the group’s radio stations…
…Following the newspaper’s columnist Fintan O’Toole saying he would no longer go on Newstalk in the wake of George Hook’s comments about rape…
… Kitty Holland, who is the Social Affairs Correspondent at The Irish Times, “confronted” Mr O’Brien about the ban…
Just tlking to Den O’Brien. Says ban on @IrishTimes journos nothing to do w him but @fotoole a “nasty” journo. All @NewstalkFM staff “angry”
Further to yesterday’s publication of the Report on the Concentration of Media Ownership in Ireland – commissioned by Sinn Fein MEP Lynn Boylan – and advance copies being given to the Sunday newspapers at the weekend…
Fintan O’Toole, in The Irish Times, writes:
Yesterday’s Irish Independent carried no word of the media ownership report. TheSunday Independent did deal with it, but by way of comment rather than reportage. Liam Collins opened his Zozimus column on page 12 with a reference to “Yet another tiresome blog on the ‘worrying lack of plurality’ in the Irish media from that paragon of British liberalism, Roy Greenslade.”
Greenslade, who is professor of journalism at City University London, had posted a piece on his Guardian blog drawing attention to the report.
It is, of course, entirely legitimate for Collins to find Greenslade’s writing on the subject tiresome – that’s a matter of opinion.
What’s striking, though, is that the only account of the report that readers of the Independent titles received on Sunday and Monday was through an attack on another reporter whose views were discounted in advance because he is, of all despicable things, a paragon of British liberalism.
Those readers would have no idea what the report actually says. The substance of Collins’s take on it, indeed, is that no one should bother reading it.
… The essential point, however, is that the sum total of the information presented on this event in the Independent papers on Sunday and Monday was to the effect that Shinners, Brits, liberals and socialists (a range of targets for contempt to suit every taste) have produced a tiresome document that you, the reader, don’t need to know about.
Fine Gael TD and junior minister Damien English launching the party’s Investing in the Early Years Plan in the CHQ Building, Dublin before the election in February
I was somewhat surprised to learn that Fintan O’Toole takes his policy views from US talk radio (I would have thought he was more a Guardian reader myself) but that probably explains why his view on foreign direct investment and Ireland’s industrial policy is so out of touch with reality.
The taxation of multinationals is based on the source principle. Countries tax the profits from operations located in their countries. Although some of the world’s largest companies have operations in Ireland, we can only tax them on the profit they generate from their activities in Ireland. This we do.
The issue being debated in the US at the moment, however, relates to a loophole in the US tax code which allows “deferral” of corporate income taxes, and allows US multinationals to delay certain tax payments until the profits are transferred to US-incorporated entities in their corporate structure.
Some companies (not surprisingly) are trying to defer payment for ever. We aren’t the problem. The US tax code is.
Indeed, the US treasury secretary has written to the European Commission stating that while the US does not collect the tax until repatriation, the US system of deferral “does not give EU member states the legal right to tax this income”.
Ireland’s 12½ per cent corporation tax rate is a key part of our offering to multinationals but it is not the only reason they come here.
We offer access to EU markets, a well-educated and a highly skilled workforce. Winning the war for talent is critical to our future success.
That is why my work as Minister of State for Skills, Research and Innovation was focused on making sure we continued to foster and develop Ireland’s talent pool through a new innovation strategy and a new skills strategy.
I look forward to hearing Fintan explain the real facts of the matter to Rush Limbaugh or the good folks who listen to the News from Lake Wobegon.
Damien English TD
Minister of State for Skills,
Research and Innovation,
Leinster House, Dublin 2.
Anne-Marie McNally, of the Social Democrats, writes:
“This is a come-along event, no tickets required, all welcome on the evening. We’ll be talking about how we can and should do things differently – how do we make politics serve the people rather than the golden circle of the same faces and names that keep cropping up; and how do we develop and implement proper transparency with real accountability in a way that allows people to trust the system? I’ll open up, Catherine Murphy will speak, followed by Fintan O’Toole, then I’ll close.”
From top: David McWilliams; Fintan O’Toole; Julien Mercille
Budget 2016 either betrayed the coalition’s ignorance or its cunning.
Only you can decide.
Dr Julien Mercille writes:
Fintan O’Toole is associated with the left and David McWilliams likes the market. Both have made important contributions to our understanding of Irish politics and economics. They each have their cohort of fans, while driving some of their opponents nuts.
They both wrote on Budget 2016 and I want to highlight one important issue in this respect on which I think O’Toole is incorrect, whereas McWilliams is more on target.
Fintan O’Toole seems to think that the government is rather incompetent, irrational, and has no clue what it’s doing.
For example, last week, he wrote a piece entitled “The Minister for Finance and his know-nothing Budget”. He argued that “one of the things the system chooses not to know is how the budget really works”. Michael Noonan, the Minister for Finance, “is like a plumber turning on a stop cock without knowing where the pipes are”, because he will not produce an analysis showing if the Budget is progressive or regressive. In other words, “this is government by willful ignorance”.
This interpretation sometimes reappears in O’Toole’s writings, for instance, in his book “Ship of Fools”, whose title reiterates the idea.
This type of commentary is also often heard in the media and in conversations. In fact, it’s the mainstream criticism of government: politicians are ignorant, incapable and ridiculous.
However, it’s time to stop taking politicians for irrational idiots. Politicians are rational and usually quite competent. The thing to understand is that they govern following the interests of elites, and the policies they enact reflect those interests (we can debate whether such policies are good or bad, but that’s a separate issue).
Indeed, Social Justice Ireland produced an excellent report on Budget 2016 (there is also an analysis of the cumulative impact of Budgets 2009 to 2015 here).
The report shows the following about Budget 2016:
– It is the fifth regressive budget in a row, meaning that they have favoured the better off more than the poor.
– It widens the rich-poor gap by €506 a year.
– While single unemployed people gain €95 a year, single people earning €75,000 gain almost ten times as much, or €902.
– It is “extremely generous” toward multinational companies. The “Knowledge Development Box” plan means that such companies will now be able to avail of an even lower tax rate of 6.25% (as opposed to the regular 12.5% tax rate) for part of their operations.
– In general, the Budget’s tax changes favour those who earn more.
– It fails to deliver any significant increase in social welfare payments.
The question to ask is: does this reveal a government that doesn’t know what it’s doing, throwing darts in the dark? If policy was so foolish and the government so irrational, one would expect a relatively even distribution of the tax and spending benefits, but this isn’t what we see.
And for those on the right who think that’s just another left-wing conspiracy, no, you don’t need to be on the left to say something like that—you just need to understand how the system works.
For example, David McWilliams writes that this is a budget “aimed at convincing the middle classes that this is the government you can trust”. In particular, the Capital Gains Tax is reduced from 33% to 20% and this means that “the State is siding with those people who own capital. These are mainly the already rich”. To reiterate, “it’s clear that the big winners are the already rich”.
And the important point is this: “This is not the unintended consequence of policy. It is policy”.
This strikes me as a more accurate description of how the system works.
Picturing politicians as clownish and irrational leads to the following natural solution: if we could only find better ones, things would be fine.
However, in fact, to make things better, it is the system as a whole that needs to be modified so as to make it more egalitarian.
Fintan O’Toole at the Social Democrats policy night
Last Friday night, The Social Democrats hosted a policy event at the Hilton Hotel, Charlemount Place, Dublin 2 .
The keynote address was given by Fintan O’Toole.
Grab a tay.
It’s a huge pleasure and privilege to be here with you tonight and I suppose I’m here for the same reason the vast majority of you are here. Firstly, because I have enormous admiration for the work that Catherine [Murphy], Róisín [Shortall] and Stephen [Donnelly] have done.
Over the lifetime of this Dáil, they have been, in some ways, very dark days for Irish democracy and it’s really mattered deeply to all of us I think that we have had examples of democracy in action, of people who have had a fundamental sense of public service and what it means, who understand the concepts of accountability, who do hold on to the belief that power does come from the people and that the Republic does belong to its citizens.
And to put that in action, in a way that transcends the sort of politics or patronage and clientelism that has held this country back for so long. On a personal level, it’s lovely to be here.
I just thought it would also be an opportunity to just talk a little bit about what is social democracy? What is it that we mean by this concept and why do we need to address what seems, in some ways, a political concept that’s been around for a very long time.
Well I suppose the first thing we say is: it hasn’t been around for a very long time in Ireland.
One of the distinguishing things about Ireland, when people ask, ‘Why don’t basic things work? Why do we not have a functioning system for childcare, for example, why is our childcare one of the least adequate and most expensive in the world? Why do we not have a system of public housing provision that functions? Why do we not have a health service that functions?’
Well, one of the obvious answers is we are one of the very few societies in Europe that has never had a social democratic government. Never.
Social democratic values, social democratic institutions are under enormous pressure all over Europe and all over the developed world but at least they have existed and they have built things over generations which are actually quite hard to shift.
Even the Tories in Britain find it hard to take away the public’s relationship with the National Health Service, for example, because it has been built and because it has functioned, not perfectly, but it has a really important place in people’s identity with Britain.
We haven’t we had that? We’ve had bits of it. And the bits that we have had have worked. One of the reasons why social democracy, to me, is not an abstract concept is I wouldn’t be here talking to you if not for the little bits of social democracy that we got in the Irish context. Two big things happened to make me who I am, for good and ill.
One of those is a massive public housing project after the Second World War when Ireland was on its uppers, when it was still in the post-war depression, when it was not sharing in the great prosperity of Western Europe, it still was able to clear the slums of Dublin, public housing was built.
I grew up in one of those houses, I grew up in one of those communities, they were by no means perfect, they were by no means magnificent or grand but they were a hell of a lot better then what people had experienced before.
My parents moved out of slums, they moved into relatively decent housing: that had an enormous impact on my life. And on the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. If we could do that in the grim 1940s, why do we find it impossible to imagine that we could solve our housing crisis now?
The second thing that really shaped me was a bold, outrageous, reckless idea which was that we might have free secondary education.in 1968, when I was ten years old.
Remember this was brought in by a minister against the wishes of the Department of Finance and indeed, against the knowledge of the Department of Finance, Donogh O’Malley announced it before it had been approved. Why? Because it wouldn’t have been approved, it didn’t make sense, we didn’t have the money. It was an irresponsible thing to be doing.
So you had an actual Fianna Fáil minister who had to go out and announce it, make it a fact and then, of course, once it was a fact, it became something that was obvious to everybody: why was Ireland one of the last developed societies to have free secondary education because we didn’t have social democratic tradition.
We didn’t see this as important. But if it wasn’t for that people like me, and again hundreds of thousands of people like me, I’m sure like many of you, would not have even got to secondary school, it was not something that was available to us.
So social democratic choices being made at key points in people’s lives are not abstract, they actually change the life chances of individuals and, by doing that, make a better society.
There’s a sense, I think, and a narrative that’s being put out at the moment is that what we need overall is stability, about the great value in stability and that what we have at the moment is working fine and we just need more of it. Just three statistics, I don’t want to bore you with statistics, but three that are relevant:
One is we have,over the last five years, effectively doubled consistent child poverty. Now leave aside the human cost of that, leave aside the outrage of the attack on the basic human rights of children who are growing up in poverty, the economic, fiscal costs of this is absolutely enormous.
We know that whatever money we supposedly saved through austerity, we will pay ten times over in the cost of health, of not having productive people in the economy paying taxes, in the cost of the criminal justice system and so on and so on. We know this, this is evidence-based, this is not airy fairy, this is reality.
Two figures from the OECD report on Ireland, produced [last] week, that should really be quite shocking to us, to start with. One is that one in six Irish-born people, people born in the Republic of Ireland, one in six of us is now living abroad. And they’re doing so, by a large extent, by choice. Very, very many of these people are not people who are completely unemployed and don’t have a choice whatsoever, they are choosing to do so because they don’t believe in this place.
They don’t believe that Ireland is capable of offering them opportunity to be the kind of people that they think they can be. And that’s alarming to us. Again, it’s bad for our society, it’s bad for our families, it’s bad for our communities.
But, again, just think about the cost of that. These are people of working age, who are largely very well educated. We’re losing their skills, we’re losing the demographic boldness that we had in this young population. That’s a fiscal cost, that’s an economic cost that we’re not counting.
And one other startling figure from the OECD report: 50 per cent of Irish people – 50 per cent – depend on the State to keep them out of poverty. It’s an astonishing statistic, it’s the highest proportion of population in the entire developed world.
So one in every two people in Ireland would be living in poverty, if it were not for social transfers. That tells us a couple of things, it tells us that the State matters enormously to huge numbers of people in our society in the simple sense that they cannot make a living, they can’t live a decent life without the State.
But it also tells us that our economy, which is, in some ways, a success story, in some ways, it really is. But it’s not an economy which is currently capable of allowing the majority of its citizens to actually earn a living, a decent living.
Fifty per cent of people can’t make enough money in the ordinary economy, without welfare payments, they would be in poverty, and one in six are out of the country, making their living elsewhere.
And these are things that we tend to just accept, as normalities. And they’re not normalities. Even if you look within the contemporary developed world, with all its problems, with all the growing, you’ve got massive disjunctions of inequality that are around the world, we are outliers in this regard.
There isn’t always [inaudible]. And therefore if we are unique in this, it suggests that we don’t have to put up with this, things don’t have to be like that. And so we come up to social democracy as a political philosophy, the way of looking at the world that can begin to address these kinds of issues and make Ireland a better place for all its citizens.
I think social democracy, in a sense, the first thing to say about it is it’s not a utopian set of ideas.
Social democracy isn’t based on the idea that the State, the Government, can make everybody happy, that it can create a perfect society. It’s not about that, at all. It’s not about the maximum human beings can achieve because there shouldn’t be any limit on what that maximum is.
Social democracy is actually about the minimum. It’s actually about: what are the most basic things that people need in order to lead a dignified existence – that’s the question social democracy asks.
A dignified existence, what is a dignified existence? Well a dignified existence really has five basic components: they are five things that a human being needs in order to be able to feel that they are citizens in a Republic.
The condition of being in a Republic is defined by the Irish political philosopher Philip Pettit, actually rather brilliantly, as that condition where ‘we can look one another in the eye without reason for fear or deference’.
It’s a basic equality that we all look one another in the eye, we don’t need to be afraid of each other, we don’t need to defer to each other. Why? Because we are equal citizens.
And that’s fundamental to human dignity. That’s what it means to be a full human being. And to do that you need five things. First of all you need the democracy bit of social democracy. And Catherine [Murphy] has already spoken about this but it is very, very clear that the promised democratic revolution, that we apparently had in 2011, has been nothing of the kind. If anything what we’ve had is a further centralisation of power, away from public control. We’ve had the entirely unconstitutional Economic Management Council invented. There’s no basis for this in Irish law or in the Irish constitution. It’s the most powerful body in the State. It accounts to nobody.
We’ve had an even further, it’s very hard actually to say this, it did not seem possible in 2011 that the Dáil could become less central to democratic life in the country. It was already probably the weakest parliament in the democratic world, in terms of its ability to actually do its job of imposing accountability on power.
It’s actually, if anything, become weaker: the use of the guillotine to force through legislation, the attitudes of Government towards the representatives of the people as, again, Catherine [Murphy] saw most obviously when Michael Noonan found himself giving the exactly same answers or explanations as to why he misled the Dáil as Ray Burke gave, in the early 1990s in the beef scandals. Ray Burke was asked in the beef tribunal, ‘why didn’t you answer these questions in the Dáil?’ and he said, ‘well if you don’t ask me the right question, I don’t give you the right answer.’
Michael Noonan gave exactly the same answer as to why he had refused to divulge information which was absolutely pertinent to the questions that were being asked. The only thing that changed is that actually Catherine [Murphy] was asking the right questions: exactly the right questions, precisely the right questions and they were still not answered.
So that attitude to citizenship, that attitude to our democracy is absolutely key one. We do need to empower ourselves as a political community and this will not be done from the top. What we’ve discovered is that if things just carry on as they are, we may get minor reforms but there is no real interest in using the capacity of Irish citizens to actually responsibly take part in the key decisions that affect their own lives.
The second thing that is absolutely central is equality: is a notion of equality and, of course, equality has very many different parts. Of course it includes equality of gender, of sexual orientation or ethnicity. But it also has an economic component. One of the things that social democracy brings to the table is that it says: equality is not just a set up of legal structures, it’s actually something that has to exist in our day-to-day lives. And there has to be a sufficient level of economic equality for people to actually be equals in society.
Which of us can look at Denis O’Brien in the eye without reason for fear or deference? I suppose we all try to do that. But the fact is there are fundamental inequalities and those inequalities come out of the grotesque disparities of income and of wealth. And I don’t think social democracy says, ‘you know what? we’re going to have absolute equality of income,’
it doesn’t try to do that. But what it says is that you need sufficient level of equality in order for people to be able to function as equal citizens. And you need to have a sense that there is a project that we’re moving steadily towards greater equality rather than moving away from it, as we have been over the last 20 years in most of the western world.
What does equality mean? Well we know damn well what it doesn’t mean. We know damn well that if you double consistent child poverty over five years, you are building in structural inequalities which will distort our society for 20, 30, 40, 50 years to come. But we also know and this is what social democracy has to act on is that we’re not doomed to do this.
These cycles are not fate, they’re not god-given, they can be broken. There are now extremely successful ways of intervening early, in the lives of children, which can actually have a really measurable outcomes in their educational achievements, their social connectivity, their relationships with the communities within which they exist. We can actually do this.
So we can do this in a relatively short period of time and it seems to me that if we prioritise equality in terms of say, at least, at least our 18-month-old children, at least we start with a sense that at the very beginning of life, children have the same kinds of opportunities as they can chances. We don’t have that right now.
The most shocking document in Ireland is probably the Growing Up In Ireland study which is being done, it’s a longitudinal study which is looking in detail at a real group of children who were born in 2008 at the time of the crash. What do we see?
We see that, at three years old, you could walk into a room and you could pick out, without absolute accuracy, the children who are poor from the children who are not poor.
Why? Because they look different. They look different at three years old. They’re a different height. They’re a different weight. This is what we’re building into our society. We don’t need to do that. There are other ways of prioritising public policy to focus on the things that really matter.
The fourth and fifth things that we need to focus on, sorry the third and fourth things we need to focus on are very obvious. I mean one of the basic necessities for human dignity is shelter, is housing. We know that the market, in itself, is not going to solve the housing crisis in Ireland. Why do we know this? Because we’ve been through it. We’ve been through a period in which we built astonishing numbers of houses, the market produced vast numbers of houses.
The market produced, from the late 1990s up to the crash, produced 800,000 new houses in Ireland. That’s one new house for every 5 and a half people in the country. Astonishing numbers and yet we still had 250,000 people in housing need. We had, at one point, we actually had 250,000 empty houses and 250,000 people in housing need. Why? Because market-led housing, yes of course it has a huge place but it’s not going to address the fact that in order to have housing as a basic human right, you need social housing, you actually need housing which conceives of the right to shelter as being a fundamental one in human society.
And, again, we know we can do this. We’ve done it before. For a lot of the history of the State, 30 per cent of housing being built in Ireland was social housing. When Ireland was much much poorer it was able to do these kinds of things. There’s no reason why we can’t do it again. Yet what do we see? We see the Government’s housing strategy’s complete dependence on the market, on the private sector, on the rental sector to solve these problems. They will not be solved, there is another way of doing it. And these are things that don’t necessarily require enormous genius, they require political priority, a sense of direction, a sense of long-term thinking about how we’re going to deal with these things.
And then the last two things are very basic and I’m not telling you anything you didn’t already hear: health and education. We do not have, still, in this State, approaching its 100th anniversary, we do not have a health system which treats the lives of each citizen as being worth exactly the same as any other citizen.
We know that there are grotesque inequalities in the way our health service works but we also know that those inequalities are also grotesque inefficiencies. If you keep trying to do as we do: run two parallel health services, you shouldn’t be surprised that you misallocate resources, that nobody quite knows what’s going on, that you can’t get a fix on how resources are being used.
The basic principle of an efficient health service is that the money follows the patient. Health professionals get paid for treating people, it’s not that difficult to grasp. And yet what we have is a system in which the clarity of where that money’s going, how it’s being used, and whether it’s being used for the very basic purpose of treating the people who are in most need first – all of those kinds of questions – simply can’t be answered within the system that we have.
And again we have promises that this is going to be revolutionised. The key social priority of the Government, apart from the austerity programme, was universal health insurance. It has been a complete failure. There’s been absolutely almost no progress not that. And we see some of the reasons for that in some of the things Róisín Shorthall tried to stand up for – the use of patronage and clientelism going back into the allocation of basic resources.
Putting justice into the health service, building a health service over time, which actually is capable of making a very basic statement which is that the life of every single person in Ireland is worth as much as the life of every other person. It has to be a key, basic demand of a social democratic party.
And finally, of course, there’s education. We know that the shape of our society is increasingly determined by education and our education failures and inequalities reproduce themselves in an economy that doesn’t work. The reason why 50 per cent of people in Ireland can’t make a living is because they are not sufficiently well educated. Again, the OECD report is very, very stark on this.
People who have less than a Leaving Cert in Ireland have 40 per cent of the median, so education is shaping the economy and shaping people’s chances within the economy. And education is a public good. It’s not a private enterprise. It’s a public good, it’s something we do, it’s something we organise, it’s something we can organise differently, we can organise better. It’s something in particular again, that we can go back to start thinking about how do we begin at birth and give children opportunities to develop themselves to be the best they can be.
Think about the enormous, economic cultural community and social benefits that we would get, from being able to do something that is actually quite possible which is that by the end of this decade of centenaries, when we’re actually looking a the centenary of the foundation of the State, we actually could be in a position to say that we have virtually eliminated child poverty. That might sound utopian, it’s not at all, these are things that can actually be done. There are practical policy approaches that can make these things happen.
If we were able to do those kinds of things, then we would be saying that we actually are a society which has the capacity to think about the future, which has the capacity to build things over time, that make life better for the majority of its citizens and would return to Irish citizens what they have lost, I think particularly since the crash which is a sense that they can make a difference to their own lives. That they can have pride in their status, as citizens, that they can feel that they really belong to a Republic that also belongs to them.
