Sir, – Michelle Murphy of Social Justice Ireland ("Robust social dialogue needed to address cost-of-living crisis", Opinion & Analysis, April 20th) makes a powerful case that people on the lowest incomes are the hardest hit by inflation and that the recent Government measures have all been attempts to dampen price increases, rather than raising incomes. Such policies are largely ineffective.
Recent reports on housing and poverty from Social Justice Ireland and St Vincent de Paul have reinforced the inadequacy of such supporting measures.
It is well-established that poverty leads to high levels of stress which reduces the “bandwidth” for decision-making, so that health, education and general wellbeing all suffer.
This in turn leads to higher health and other costs for the whole of society as well as an unacceptably low standard of living for a high proportion of the population.
I offer two suggestions.
First, that the Government overcomes its resistance to putting money into people’s hands and trusts them to make good decisions about what to do with it. There is plenty of evidence that in general people apply such income to improve their wellbeing, resulting in overall reduced costs to the economy.
Second, every department of Government should ask the following question about every policy: how will this affect the poorest people in our society?
These two suggestions may go a long way toward alleviating poverty and encourage the social dialogue that Michelle Murphy urges. – Yours, etc,
ALAN TUFFERY,
Raheny,
Dublin 5.