IF you've been watching the morning press conferences of the British Labour party, on Sky television, you may have had a sense of a seriously well prepared alternative political establishment waiting to take over, not just to gain office, but so as to take things and change them. I cannot remember when last there was that feeling in Ireland.
We proceed towards change, here, when we proceed at all, very gradually.
The way things are is taken as the way things have to be. Thus, for example, we have schemes and budgets for job creation and training all over the place - mainly in FAS but also anywhere some empire building civil servant managed to corner a slice of the action. But until CORI - the Conference of Religious of Ireland - got going on the subject there was no one to say, simply: here is something that needs doing, here is someone who wants to do it, and here is the general amount of money for training job creation. Let us ignore all bureaucratic boundaries, match the task to the person, and call the money we give the person pay.
Take Mary, for instance, and the job she wants to do. She is on a FAS scheme. She is a "class room assistant", helping the teachers and pupils in a busy school with every task except direct teaching. She loves the work: the school says she's very good at it, and she wants to go on doing it for many years.
But she must come off the scheme because "job preparation" and "skill acquisition" are the mantras of the EU training establishment. She has to fit into the training model. Even though the job - classroom assistant - doesn't exist without the scheme. And ever though she doesn't need training for it.
CORI did a pilot scheme whereby people on Community Employment schemes, like Mary in her school, can have the placement turned into a job. The present Government announced last week that it will enormously expand the CORI scheme. Fianna Fail has said it will also. I believe they both mean it, but I wouldn't hold my breath. There are huge turf wars involved here. Not to mention that even when these Community Employments are reclassified as jobs, they'll still only be on contracts for three or four years.
WHY can't Mary get some other job? you may ask. A better job, maybe, that she could be prepared for through one of the excellent FAS training opportunities? But here we touch upon a difference between older women and men when it comes to work. She's at ease in this particular job as a consequence of her personal history.
Since many, many women in the State share that history, her dilemma highlights the extent to which the idea that employment outside the home is either a job, or training for a job, discriminates against women returning to the paid workforce.
Lots of women look like Mary, an energetic person in her early 50s, with blonde highlights and a cheerful, lived in face. More of a doer than a thinker, you can see. She hasn't had much schooling. She feared the nuns, because they slapped her and when her parents went up to the convent and threatened to send her to the Protestant school if they ever put a finger on her again, they mocked her.
We're not allowed smack Mary, are we? Because Mary's spoilt, isn't she?" She got married at 8. She worked on and off: knocking cardboard boxes into shape in a factory, washing up in the kitchen of a pub at lunchtime and so on.
After seven years she left - "I ran, not walked away" - her marriage. She has been with her present partner for 24 years. They have brought up three children, all now in work.
She bitterly resents that she and her man were warned not to try to take Holy Communion when the children were receiving the Sacraments. Other than that, she has no complaints with the hand life dealt her.
But when her own mother, whom she loved dearly, died, she fell into a depression. Eventually her children said, "Mam, you can't just sit there looking at the wall."
She went to a FAS office. She saw the job of classroom assistant advertised. She rang a few places in fear and trembling. "I told them I was too old, and I probably couldn't do it anyway." When she got the job her life was transformed. "I had a reason to do myself up in the morning. I was back in the human race. It's only £20 a week more than the labour, but I just adore it."
MARY managed to get three years on the scheme, but she must come off it now. After six months she can apply to FAS again, but what she thinks of as her" job will be gone to somebody else. She asks why she must come off the scheme, because her time is up, so that someone else will go on to it, who then will come off it to make way for someone else.
She doesn't want to re-train. She doesn't want a better job. She wants this job, which will never be more than low paid and part time. She wants the kind of job that is totally out of fashion, now. Yet they're the kind that suit her skills. And she has skills the domestic ones the child oriented ones - the ones she practised day and night for quarter of a century, running her home and minding her children.
She has done the main job of her life. It is still her primary interest and her main support. Access to paid work in the outside world is as much her right as anybody else's. But she doesn't think of paid work the way a man, whose job will be his main work, does.
FAS, in its dealings with Mary, was admirably unbureaucratic. When she had to leave her class room assistant job the first time, for instance (before she managed to get a third year on the scheme), the FAS office she deals with sent a personal note with her P60 saying how sorry it was, and it enclosed four pages of details of other places she could try for, and training courses she could do. "I think the world of the FAS people," she says. "It's not their fault: it's the system."
FAS has to proceed as if its clients are in the business of acquiring skills so as to get into permanent employment eventually. The numbers involved in this piece of national self deception are very large. In schools alone - if I read the FAS report correctly - 8,000 people are on Community Employment schemes.
Mary can't be made equal by equality legislation - only by structural reform. I wish the Department of Enterprise and Employment good luck in implementing CORI's schemes into jobs proposal. These aren't abstract matters.
Mary is going to have to say goodbye to her friends and her beloved school very soon. And there's nothing she herself can do about it. This Government, and the next one, will either fail her, or they will not. We'll see.