Madam, – The McCarthy report has contributed greatly to our understanding of how the public sector spends; what seems to be lacking, however, is a broader analysis of what the public sector is meant to achieve. In this newspaper (July 23rd) Maureen Gaffney has persuasively cautioned against sacrificing necessary agencies in the rush to trim the public sector. We also need to understand that complex social issues can’t be seen in isolation.
One key priority for Government that we can all agree on is the need to reduce crime and to build a safer society. While McCarthy concludes, correctly, that the replacement of Mountjoy and Cork prisons with modern facilities could create some efficiencies, there is no analysis of the economic or social prudence of continuing to expand a prison system that costs €100,000 per prisoner per year. From an economic perspective, reducing crime rates at the cause of crime is much cheaper than treating the symptoms through imprisonment.
Even in the United States, the world’s biggest gaoler, it is now accepted that dollars spent on early interventions in high-risk communities save multiple dollar amounts in the longer term. For example, a recent study in Washington State has shown that investing $2,400 in well-designed supports for the families of young offenders can save the taxpayer almost $50,000 in the longer term by reducing reoffending. In the same way, investing just $600 in providing targeted early childhood education to the most disadvantaged communities saves society on average $15,000 per child in lower future crime rates.
We know that our prison population is made up in significant part by young people who have fallen through the cracks of our care system, our education system and our mental health services and who come largely from a small number of extremely poor urban communities. In balancing the books for 2009, we need to plan for a society that will be a going concern for some time into the future.
From that perspective, one does not need a PhD in economics to foresee that cuts in resources to high-risk groups could well mean storing up much larger social and economic liabilities for future generations. Surely a false economy? – Yours, etc,
LIAM HERRICK,
Executive director,
Irish Penal Reform Trust,
Upper Ormond Quay,
Dublin 7.
Madam, – In the welter of comment after the “Bord Snip Nua” report, it is difficult to draw public attention to what might be perceived as “smaller” areas. However, they can be important for illustrating important underlying trends, and in particular whether we as a society are adapting to the new reality of the ageing of our population.
This is particularly the case for the recommendations for the Rural Transport Programme, an enlightened, effective and modest programme of co-funding of community transport initiatives by the Department of Transport, which recognised that: 1. Accessible transportation is a key part of social inclusion. 2. A lack of transport has huge knock-on effects on other services. 3. Older people are at risk from the natural trend towards withdrawal from driving, as well as the erosion of public transport.
A decline in public transport availability was shown in the first Irish longitudinal study on ageing (HESSOP-2) to be most marked in rural areas, and the effectiveness of the Rural Transport Programme has been graphically displayed in an important ethnographic study in 2007, Connections: Mobility and Quality of Life for Older People in Rural Ireland. Taken in context with President McAleese's initiative on loneliness in older people, as well as a general policy wish for joint working with the social economy, the response of the Department of Transport has been timely, measured, and most importantly, gerontologically aware.
The justification of the proposed ending of the programme “given the availability of private sector bus alternatives, the high level of car ownership and the underutilisation of synergies with other publicly funded local transport services” is undermined by the reality of the lack of appetite from the private sector bus sector for local rural services, the inevitable trend to withdrawal from driving with advanced age and disability, and the decline in rural public transport.
The deeper concern remains a failure of government to embrace the need for adapting policies to our increasing knowledge base on the reality of ageing, which brings both opportunity and challenges to our society. A commitment to ensuring that a proportion of those developing and directing policy in all government departments have training in gerontology (the science of ageing) would be an important start: if we design for the young, we exclude the old, but if we design for the old, we include the young. – Yours, etc,
Prof DESMOND O’NEILL
MD FRCPI,
Aois agus Eolas – Centre for
Ageing, Neuroscience and the
Humanities,
Trinity College Dublin,
College Green,
Dublin 2.