Mammon wins in sale of church owned city haven

IF social justice was easy, we'd all be at it. If the problems of poverty and deprivation could be tackled without anyone having to pay a price the poor would be deluged by the milk of human kindness. Unfortunately, what makes morality moral and justice just is that they are bloody hard.

The Catholic Church in Ireland has been, to its great credit, a powerful voice for the poor. Both as advocates and as activists, many of its members have done, and continue to do, superb work for broken communities and shattered individuals.

Many religious orders have argued with passion and conviction that the comfortable and the well to do must be prepared to bear the financial cost of overcoming the effects of economic marginalisation on others. But what happens when church institutions are themselves asked to pay a price for social justice?

On Dublin's northside, half way between two of the State's most socially deprived areas - the north inner city and Ballymun - there is a very special place. It is a 3 1/2 acre walled garden on the grounds of the missionary seminary, All Hallows.

It is a beautiful and peaceful place, a kind of sanctuary in the city. For the past 15 years, it has been the home of a small but superb social project, the Training Workshop in Horticulture, funded by the Presbyterian Church, FAS, and the Probation and Welfare Service.

Since it was established, about 300 people - mostly young and mostly troubled - have passed through here, each of them for at least a year. It now has 14 trainees. About 40 per cent of them are referrals from the Probation and Welfare Service - young people who have been in trouble with the law and who need a safe place to rehabilitate.

Most of the rest are early school leavers, often without basic skills in reading and arithmetic. The courses they study use organic gardening as a central part of a broader education which includes literacy, numeracy, computer skills and personal development.

VERY often the course achieves nothing and the young people end up in trouble again. But there are also success stories.

One young man who now runs his own landscaping business was homeless when he came to the workshop.

A workers' co op made up of four ex participants operated successfully for three years. Three of its members then went into business on their own, while the fourth joined the music industry, becoming a road manager. For many others, the All Hallows garden has been a vital oasis in the long journey towards stability and self respect.

The land has been held by the workshop on a year to year licence, for which it paid £100 a month - an arrangement typical of the generosity one might expect a Christian church to show in its dealings with a charitable project.

About three months ago, men in jeeps, with clip boards and measuring tapes, appeared on the site. The workers in the garden were told that it was "just a survey".

Then, on April 11th, the project leaders got a letter from a firm of solicitors informing them that the land was now owned by Bencar Trading Ltd, a property development company. They were given three months to quit. According to reports, the land had been sold by All Hallows for £4 million - the college refuses to confirm a figure.

The people who run the workshop insist that they had no idea that the land was being sold. They have engaged in long term developments and a plant pottery, which has taken two years to develop, has just come on line. They now have no idea what will happen.

The bursar of All Hallows told me the college was perfectly within its rights not to directly inform the people who run the workshop that the land was being sold from under them.

The chairman of its management committee was, he said, informed that the site was about to be sold. After the sale had gone through, "the formalities of the licence were complied with". The legally required three months' notice was delivered.

The college, he said, needed money for refurbishment and development, and the primary duty of its trustees (most of whom are members of the Vincentian order) was to get it. The site of the garden was bringing "a pittance" into the college's coffers. They reasoned: "There's a piece of land back there. It's doing nothing for the college. We have to sell it.

HE also warned that, by going public, the workshop was running the risk of losing the goodwill of the church which it would need in order to get another site.

"They're shooting themselves in the foot. The Vincentians have a number of other sites but if somebody rings me asking for a reference, I'll have to think very carefully about it.

"I couldn't transfer that kind of carry on to someone else. The best advice I could give them would be to keep their heads down. The antics of these people would be losing them a lot of support."

From the church's point of view, the commercial logic of selling the land is uncontestable. Why be content with £1,200 a year when you can bring in a few million?

But the argument that the church has been making over recent years is precisely that commercial logic is not enough. The Conference of Religious in Ireland, in its 1997 socioeconomic review, criticises the Government's "almost total preoccupation with economic growth" which caused it to tolerate "the persistence of poverty, increasing long term unemployment and ever deepening divisions in Irish society".

It gives an eloquent definition of social exclusion: "It means your opinion is not sought and it doesn't count... When you are one of the excluded, politicians and policymakers can ignore you without fear of censure or loss of position. When your rights are compromised, the avenues of redress open are very few and haphazard."

Just as pertinently, it quotes Pope Paul VI's statement that "private property does not constitute for anyone an absolute and unconditional right. No one is justified in keeping for his/her exclusive use what is not needed when others lack necessities . . . The right to property must never be exercised to the detriment of the common good."

The sincerity of these views is unquestionable. But why do they not apply to the church itself, which is, after all, by far the largest owner of land and property in Ireland?

Where, in the decision to sell the All Hallows garden, is the transcendence of merely commercial values? Where is the concern to seek the views of the excluded? Where is the balancing of property rights against the common good? And what, then, is the price of social justice?