In the past decade the Irish middle class swelled as incomes rose and education became more accessible. Now poorer and fewer, how will they survive the age of austerity, asks KATHY SHERIDAN
‘PHEW. That’s not so bad, is it?” whistled a fortysomething professional after hearing the first reports of the recent Budget . Only a few days earlier, fuelled by copious draughts of St Emilion (“Aldi – brilliant value”) in her vast open-plan kitchen and anticipating a financial hammering, the same woman had unleashed a diatribe that encompassed “the fat tax exiles who fly in to lecture the proles”, “the families popping out one baby after another, sponging off the State” and “the whole bloody public sector who think we owe them a living”.
Which left her “classic middle class”, she raged, stuck in a profession she called a dead zone, with a demented husband trapped by soured property investments and teenage children clinging by their fingernails to private schools. “We are the coping classes, the squeezed private-sector middle class, aka the ones who pay for bloody everything and haven’t the guts to complain.” Would she allow her name to be used in this piece? “You’re kidding, aren’t you?”
That rush to privacy is one of the few remaining identifiers of the increasingly amorphous middle class. The media stands accused of covering working-class stories only when there are problems. It may also be that working-class people are less precious about identifying themselves in good times and bad, which gives any story more impact.
The upshot is that the true, human cost of this recession for a vast chunk of the population remains largely hidden. Pride is the last redoubt. Stubbornly, they keep up appearances along with the 2006 SUV – with fake four-wheel drive, as some discovered this week – and the corroding hot tub.
Behind Louise’s flailing anger is raw fear about where this nightmare ride is dragging her and her family. Somewhere in the mix is a sense of culpability, shame and personal failure – barely acknowledged but there — along with one certainty: something of herself and her social tribe has been lost forever.
But what is this tribe? “It’s cultural, not economic,” says Gerard O’Neill of Amarach Consulting, which specialises in market research. “Once people sit at a desk, they consider themselves to be middle class, and most of the job expansion in recent years has been in services.”
This probably explains why a startling 65 per cent of Irish people identify themselves as middle class when asked, regardless of the socioeconomic groups beloved of economists, sociologists and market researchers.
"It's not a tribe, it's an economic niche," says Tony Farmar, author of Privileged Lives(A A Farmar), a new social history of middle-class Ireland spanning 1882 to 1989. "When I came to Ireland my parents-in-law assured me there was no such thing as a class system here. Nonsense."
Stephen Kinsella, an economics lecturer at the University of Limerick, defines middle class by what it is not. “Take my plumber who left school at 14 and is fixing my house at €50 an hour: is he middle class or working class?” asks Kinsella. “He may be middle class on income, but not in where he comes from or in education. You can define middle class by what it’s not. They don’t earn €250,000 or above. And it’s not very poor, so they don’t earn less than €18,000. Most of the middle class are youngish and in their early 30s, like me. Most would class themselves as home-owners and they are up to their eyeballs in debt.”
Conor McCabe, in his writings for the Irish Left Reviewand dublinopinion.com, has suggested that it is power in one's workplace that defines social class. "If you're not a professional, not management and do not run a small business, in workplace terms you're part of the working class," he says.
Some years ago the psychologist and author Maureen Gaffney said that everyone was middle class. Now she says: “I mean that in the sense that the class system, the traditional way of dividing up society, has much less resonance now. Obviously, income is a class marker, but that dividing line has got very blurred. What essentially divides the middle class from the working class are two things: lifestyle and education. Lifestyle is what you put on display about yourself. For example, you could have a huge amount of bling that signals you have a lot of money but not that you’re middle class.”
The blurring and fragmentation of traditional class lines is evident in the trade-union movement, which is increasingly made up of middle-class, middle-aged females in white-collar or public-sector jobs, says O’Neill.
“You could be a trade-union member and be very middle class,” he says. “So the traditional identifiers of the working class – trade-union membership, income or occupation – have all fragmented and disappeared. I think that’s one of the problems for the political left: they actually can’t connect with the middle class because of their archaic language around class and because they have boxed themselves into fighting over what is within Ireland a marginal group relative to the total population. Don’t forget that 85 per cent of the people who had jobs at the start of the recession still have jobs.”
Yet, as the writer Robert O’Byrne has pointed out, classifying a person’s social position on the basis of occupation is no longer valid. “It might have been appropriate in the 19th century, when the upper class considered anyone involved in trade, no matter how well educated or well mannered or well heeled, as being literally declasse [inferior]. But that kind of absurd social categorisation has long since been discredited throughout Europe,” he says.
“Today class is determined not by the work you do but by [certain] characteristics: property and car ownership, third-level educational qualifications, plus an essentially conservative political and social outlook. And on that basis Ireland, cautious and establishmentarian, even after a certain and very recent liberalisation of our social mores, is middle class through and through.”
Irish people are reluctant to accept that description, because being called middle class is somehow perceived as a matter of shame, while there is no stigma in claiming to be working class, he says. “Indeed it’s often brandished as a badge of honour.”
Bertie Ahern’s determination to brand himself as pure working class, exemplified by the pint of Bass, is a case in point, given his father’s background as a scion of a middle-class farming family in east Cork. Is it because the description “middle class” is so often preceded by “smug”? Or “grasping”? Or the suspicion that a middle-class fixation with bricks and mortar has precipitated property booms and busts time and again?
Farmar says it was young Irish professionals who had done well in the City of London and came to Dublin to buy at the top of the market that led to the late-1980s boom. Then again, he also notes that a list of 90 people to watch in the 1990s published by The Irish Timeson January 1st, 1990, included not a single banker, economist or property developer. Happy days.
Bettina MacCarvill, a partner with market researchers Jump!, agrees that few want to be identified as middle class. “I think people do feel uncomfortable about the label middle class,” she says. “I don’t know if it’s because they feel they might be frowned upon. There’s almost a sense of embarrassment. I don’t know why, because the middle class makes up the majority. It’s prevalent everywhere and it’s so broad. It’s a really, really fat word that encompasses the comfortable middle class, the struggling middle class, the farming middle class, the professional middle class, the public-sector middle class.”
MacCarvill, who was born in Ranelagh, Dublin 6, and was a college student in 1980 “when it was predominantly a middle-class club”, is quintessentially middle class. She is frank about what membership of this cohort contributed to her life. “It gave me education and a sense of confidence, in that I believed that anything I wanted to do, I would be able to do it,” she says. “That was an opportunity I had by being born into a middle-class family, but at the end of the day it was up to me to make something of it.”
MacCarvill has worked hard to maintain her status, she says. “It hadn’t been a goal in my life, but I’ve worked very hard to maintain that standard of living,” she says. “I’ve created my own privilege out of certain opportunities that were handed to me. But lots of people are handed opportunities and don’t make the same of them.”
She has taken inspiration from her parents’ actions in the 1980s. “They made sacrifices to educate their children,” she says. “They always worked hard in their own business. They didn’t have comfortable, secure jobs. I remember my dad getting up at six o’clock right throughout the 1980s. I don’t remember many others doing that back then.”
So what is the sheepishness about? Is it because the grasping middle class actually takes more out of the system than it puts in?
Kinsella is not convinced. “For those earning more than €35,000 there is no way that their benefits exceed their contribution,” he says. “There is no way I get more from the State than I take in.”
If you ask what best defines traditional middle-class values, invariably the answer is education. “That’s the middle class’s greatest source of resilience,” says Gaffney. “They know that education is important, that it’s the key to social mobility and how to work the system. Those who have lifted themselves into the middle class have done so through education. You may still live in a modest house and drive a banger, but if your kids are professionals you are middle class.”
Is that something to be embarrassed about, then? O’Neill says it’s a tragedy that his children’s third-level education is being subsidised at the expense of primary-school children in deprived areas. “That’s probably the shadow side of the middle class – a giant sense of entitlement, a capacity to game the political system to their advantage but to the detriment of the less advantaged,” he says.
Gaffney says: “The middle classes like to think of themselves as the coping classes. They get very worked up about their efforts to better themselves’ being undermined and derided.”
The middle classes, like other classes, have robust capacity for self-deception, she adds. “In general human beings are hyperconscious of what we are giving or doing for others but remarkably forgetful about what we are getting back,” she says. “We can quote chapter and verse about our contributions and what we have lost but have to be reminded about what we are getting back.”
For Farmar it’s about access, particularly to education. “The key is the ability to hand on an unfair advantage, so Tim Nice-But-Dim gets a leg up as opposed to someone from a local-authority estate who’s as bright as a button. But that’s evolution for you. What society tries to do is balance the forces of evolution with trying to get the fairest for society as a whole.”
Society may try. A passage in Privileged Livesdemonstrates that there is nothing new about middle-class entitlement. A document produced in 1932 by the Civil Service Federation, when much of civil servants' pay was linked to the consumer price index (CPI), made the case that the cost of members' lifestyles and consequent burdens couldn't possibly be assessed on the same basis as the "wage-earning" class.
“The first point they made was that ‘the average civil servant’s household budget includes items which do not appear at all in that of a working-class household. Such items are travelling expenses, life insurance, restaurant meals, medical expenses, books, maidservants, etc,’ ” writes Farmar. At least one maidservant per household was de rigueur, and the period of dependency of the children was “more extended than in a working-class family”.
Furthermore, items included in the CPI would never be seen anywhere near a civil servant’s residence, such as “margarine (third grade)”. Not only that “but middle-class civil servants are usually obliged to purchase [in different types of shops], and price movements in such [shops], not being subject to the same intensity of competition, are different from other markets”.
In short, the federation maintained that increases in the cost of living so keenly felt by civil servants could be pinned Pee Flynn-style on the unfortunate circumstance of having to maintain a middle-class lifestyle. The special government committee entirely understood, of course, and recommended a separate middle-class index.
That middle-class entitlement has been massively shaken in recent years. But then so has the notion of the middle class itself in just a few decades. For example, it wasn’t until the 1981 census that just over half the houses in Dublin were recorded as owner-occupied, says Farmar. Now its youngest, most energetic members are stuck in a debt trap. Their parents, who would have retired comfortably on share dividends, are as bewildered, demoralised and angry as the young people.
One of the distinguishing features of the middle class used to be faith in the future, says O’Neill. That’s why they valued home ownership, saved for a rainy day, sent children to college and invested in the future.
The lamb-like acquiescence of the Irish has been remarked on around the world, he says. “But that’s because the middle class doesn’t riot – remember, we’ve almost all self-identified as middle-class – and because we have faith in the future and in our families,” says O’Neill. “But take that away and what have you left? I think we’re in an extremely dangerous place now. Surveys show that the middle-class faith in the future has been fragmented. The connection with the future has been severed. And don’t forget all revolutions have been led by the middle class.”
The charge would be led by a younger politician, he says, someone right of centre, because “Irish people have their hearts on the left but their wallets on the right.”
Gaffney is also concerned about the fault lines. “What I find disturbing about the current debates about who is worst hit is that it is putting our traditional social solidarity under enormous strain,” she says. “It started and continues with the bitter debate about public sector versus private sector. We have recurring debates about people living off the State. It’s something that makes me uneasy, insidiously undermining that sense of social solidarity. We’re getting mean-minded.”
MacCarvill’s company takes a word every year to symbolise the mood. This year it was “guts”. That’s “because people were going to really need guts to get through it”, she says. Next year the word is defiance: communities forging their own paths, no longer relying on big business to dig them out.
“The under-35s have a really strong sense of self-belief and confidence. They are absolutely sick of the negativity. They will set up small businesses and figure out how we can make money. There won’t be the same level of expectation as there was 10 years ago. They will be a lot more flexible and willing to take risks. Even that is defiant.”
O’Neill says: “What is really needed now is something that heals the psychological wounds and connects people to the future in a positive way, something that reconnects to middle-class virtues such as sacrifice, investment, hope and effort – because they are the ones who believe in the next generation, and that’s the quintessential motivating factor in Ireland: our children and what we bequeath them. And that means everything from compassion to the state of our roads to being the best that we can be.”
