I WAS going to propose today that little things do just as much to ruin the quality of an individual life as the big things do. I was going to start a list, knowing that you would add your own grouches to it. And I was going to point the finger - to name those responsible and ask them to do something to improve matters.
Why isn't there an underpass for traffic beside Trinity College, Luas or no Luas, for example? Huge crowds of people pile up on the pavement watching single individuals in cars take priority, waiting for the split second of green light that will allow them to cross College Street. I ask Dublin Corporation's traffic planners to go and see what they've done and change it.
I also want action from hotel managements. Have they ever stood under their showers dripping and cursing, trying to open the hotel shampoo with their teeth? And what age are they? Because I can never read what it says on the little toiletries. For all I know I'm washing my hair with a sachet of bath gel. Come to that - I can't read the dial of the washing machine either, without my glasses, or the knobs on the cooker. Why don't the designers make lettering bigger? And why have Marks and Spencer got such a miserable few changing rooms?
But I'm not going to go on about the little things. They are too petty. They don't matter compared to the things that do matter. Poverty, for example, matters. But if I had begun this column with poverty, would you have read this far? And whom do we hold responsible for the poverty around us? Whom can I call on to taken action?
I met a grand boy working in a bookshop in a country town. His background was poor and troubled, he was in trouble, the Garda brought him to the shop owner instead of prosecuting him, the shop owner took a chance on him, the other workers helped him, and he has done brilliantly. They're as proud as punch of him. He brings the cash takings to the bank, no problem. That kind of practical compassion is far more widespread in Ireland than is ever realised.
When fortunate people see something they can do for the less fortunate, they're not only willing - they're glad to do it. But many people do not see poverty. They have no knowledge of it, they therefore cannot grasp the nature and the extent of disadvantage within our society. The latest Combat Poverty research publication - on rural poverty - refers to the argument that "the existence of poverty in the advanced societies can be taken for granted now - what research should be directed towards is explaining its existence."
But I think you have to keep reminding peopled of poverty because, though it is easy to imagine the physical condition of poverty, it is almost impossible to imagine the imaginative condition, where the world and what you might do with it appear altogether differently than they do to fortunate people.
I CAN walk out of The Irish Times office and within minutes get on a bus where the people on the bus look different from the people of in general. The teenage boys are small featured and pale and thin compared to the strapping sons of the middle class. You can't imagine leather shoes on their feet, so crucial are trainers to the rapid, hunched way they walk. The girls have stick thin little bodies and clouds of frizzy hair. They turn into women with lines gouged along their cheekbones exactly where the women who have coffee in Brown Thomas stroke on a hint of Shiseido blusher.
And if it upsets you that I talk about my fellow citizens, my fellow inheritors of the republic of Pearse and Connolly as if I were an anthropologist and they were a little known tribe, it upsets me too. But the poor are a little known tribe. Not many people reading this have ever walked around Jobstown or Neilstown or have ever got into a lift in a Ballymun tower block. No one lives out on the reservations of the Dublin poor except the Dublin poor.
The mediators between classes - teachers, gardai, doctors, civil servants, journalists - don't live out on the local authority estates. In parts of Dublin, the parks department can't plant trees because they'll be cut down instantly for firewood. Yet the rural poor are worse off than the city poor because, as the Combat Poverty researchers point out, they have tended to be socially as well as politically invisible. "Even to return the issue of poverty to the rural development agenda may be an extremely difficult task, and there are clearly powerful interests both outside and inside rural and agricultural Ireland which would strongly oppose any change in policy priorities that they might interpret as downgrading their own concerns.
If you live in one of those local authority estates on the edge of small towns - the ones whose name appears predictably in the court reports of the local paper - who will care about you? Who is planning for you? I was in a house on an estate like that recently, in the west. The houses had been so meanly done that there was no form of heating in the front rooms, not even an open fireplace. Who made that decision? Well, the local authority made that decision.
Poverty doesn't define human beings. As far as I, as an outsider, can see, there is far more wit and humour, and far more goodness to each other, among the less privileged than the more privileged. Babies are born just as intelligent up some damp cul de sac off a no man's land of mud and rusting shopping trollies as they are in Mount Carmel. But nothing is believed of them or expected - and for most of this century there was no national policy specifically aimed at redressing the smallness of the world of those excluded at, birth from the best opportunities.
THERE is a chance, now, that the apparatus of government is making itself more responsive to the needs of the citizens who live in pockets of poverty all over the State. That is the level at which the manipulation of poverty has to be addressed. It's not like complaining to the management. The politicians are the people with responsibility for alleviating the injustice of poverty in this society.
The poor are not responsible for their poverty. And we're not responsible. It is true, I think, that the whole system - the whole way the State and the world makes decisions about investment and development and infrastructure - creates and perhaps even needs poverty. But individuals are not to blame because they don't know what else they could be but be part of the system.
On the whole, only government can distort the system in favour of the poor. The worst domestic news of 1996 - as bad as Canary Wharf was that the number of people living below the poverty line remains the same as it was 10 years ago. Imagine. In spite of the property and shopping band computer jobs and tax revenue boom. There's an election next year. We can ask the politicians to account for this, at the latest, then. Some of the things that cause poverty can be fixed. We can demand of the politicians that they fix them.