At 4am last Wednesday, hours before sunrise, people began gathering along Bow Street in Dublin 7. At 7am, the doors of the Capuchin Day Centre opened and staff started distributing tickets for hampers.
Kitty Holland described the scene she encountered shortly after 9.30am: the queue stretching as far as Church Street and comprising “elderly men and women, mothers holding the hands of children in school uniforms, people pushing prams and buggies, in wheelchairs, on crutches”. By then, all 3,000 hamper tickets were gone. So were the weekly food bags – all snapped up at least half an hour earlier. In its 30-year history, the centre has never run out this early in the day, its manager Alan Bailey said.
One young woman, the mother of an 11-year-old with special needs, blinked away tears as she spoke to Holland. “There is nothing for my child,” she said.
A couple of weeks earlier, Ibec’s Danny McCoy told this newspaper that he had an issue with the word “crisis” to describe the soaring cost of living. “There’s no denying the cost of living has gone up, but that’s only an issue if your income hasn’t gone up simultaneously.”
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McCoy, the chief executive of the employers’ body, acknowledged there are people in “financial distress”, but he also seemed to suggest that all this talk of a crisis might be catching. A lot of people, he mused, are merely keeping up with the Joneses in saying, “‘that’s us too’, when it’s not true”. Welfare rates have risen faster than prices, by between 4 and 6 per cent on average in each of the last three budgets, he said. “How can you describe that as a crisis?” Maybe he could go down to Bow Street next Wednesday morning and find someone to explain it to him.
McCoy isn’t wrong in one sense. Clearly, not everyone is experiencing the crisis in the same way. In this country where affluence and deprivation often co-exist on the same street, many people are not experiencing it at all.
The till receipts for Brown Thomas and its sister store Arnotts – which, depending on your preferred unit of measurement, is a 15-minute walk or half a world away from the Capuchin centre – are not quite the McDonald’s index. But the glittering, almost-nationwide monument to unfettered capitalism is a decent bellwether for how the haviest-haves in society are doing.
In September, the Brown Thomas Arnotts group posted record revenues of €337.3 million. “We are planning to double the size of the Chanel boutique,” said its delighted chief executive.
Meanwhile, one of the big ongoing rows of this year has been over the passenger cap at Dublin Airport. On one side are those who say that the survival of the tourism sector depends on increasing the numbers who can fly into the country. On the other are those who believe that permitting 40 million people to fly in and out of Dublin Airport would be reckless and unconscionable in a climate emergency.
And then there are those – the majority, you suspect – who say that of course drastic action needs to be taken to secure the future of the planet, but not until after their short hop to Marbella. As McCoy rightly pointed out, the 32 million currently flying through Dublin aren’t all tourists, but Irish people “going on their second, third, fourth, fifth trip abroad”.
Who is buying all the skiing holidays, all the €4,900 Bottega Veneta leather bags stocked in Brown Thomas, or even the €49.50 Stanley water bottles? Plenty of people, it seems. According to the Central Bank, Irish households’ financial net wealth – their savings, investments and liabilities – stood at €369 billion as of the end of June.
As McCoy pointed out, a whopping €158 billion is held in overnight deposit accounts. That’s about €80,000 per household. It’s safe to assume some people’s rainy day fund – or their Bottega Veneta fund – is far more generously endowed.
There’s a particularly Irish capacity for cognitive dissonance that allows us to slap ourselves on the back for being one of the wealthiest countries in Europe and for our supposed collective capacity for compassion – along with his much-vaunted “new energy” Simon Harris promised to bring a “new empathy” to the role of Taoiseach and to “give every child an equal start in life”. Yet we barely allow people queuing for food hampers to skirt the edges of our consciousness.
Figures published in September revealed that 230,000 children lack basic clothing and food. But the only children anyone seemed to be talking about in the run-up to the budget were the grown-up offspring of the wealthiest property owners who would be treated “unfairly” – “punitive” was the word Micheál Martin used – if something wasn’t done about the scourge of inheritance tax.
As Fintan O’Toole has written in these pages, Harris’s Government had the chance to take 40,000 of the poorest children out of poverty by introducing a means-tested second-tier of child benefit. This would not even have been controversial. No initiative except perhaps Santa himself enjoys such widespread support. Analysis by Karina Dooley and Barra Roantree for the ESRI estimated that it would cost about €700 million per year, and benefit more than 100,000 households.
Instead, the Government opted for yet another package of one-off measures that would see goodies distributed all round. So every family with eligible children gets a double payment of child benefit in November and December – the ones whose parents have to queue for baby food, and the ones whose stockings will be crammed with Stanley water bottles.
On Thursday, Bailey said that in line with the Capuchin centre’s mission that “no one would go hungry”, the mother worried about her 11-year-old would be looked after.
Why is “no one left to go hungry” not a mission for the whole of society? And why, in a country of such staggering wealth, is anyone queuing for food parcels in the cold predawn hours in the first place?