Homeless Citizens Face The Death Penalty
Fifty-one homeless citizens have died, starving and cold, on the streets of our two major cities in the last 18 months according to a report by the Simon Community.
Forty-five people have died on the streets of Dublin and a further six in Belfast. The revelations by the Simon Community/DePaul Trust at a remembrance service in Dublin recently, puts the constantly lauded ‘Celtic Tiger economy’, and the Six County ‘economic boom’ in their proper contexts. It begs the question, who benefits from the economic growth, which both the Dublin and Belfast establishments are so quick to praise?
Why, in one of the richest countries in Europe are human beings dying in the street due to a lack of basic resources like food and clothing? Although there is no doubt that the Irish economy as a whole has seen major upward economic shifts over the past 10 years, it seems that those who are in need of it most have no access to the country’s new found wealth.
While oil tycoons, landlords, and multinationals get fat off Irish labour and leave when they have had their fill, it is abundantly clear that the wants of the Irish people are not fully satisfied and provided for, as this recent example exposes. It is estimated by the Simon Community that the actual amount of people having died as a result of homelessness could be much higher than the recent information suggests.
This should not come as a surprise to working class people who know well the hardship of life on this island. Despite both the Six County assembly and Leinster House claiming economic growth, the majority of the population still struggles to make ends meet.
It is almost impossible for a public sector worker, on their current wage, to secure housing in the capital city – whether they work there or not. There are many examples of parents working two and three jobs in order to pay the bills – this is doing untold damage to families and, in turn, the fabric of society. Even those capable of affording a mortgage in Ireland wed themselves to a process of life-long debt and fear of not making the next payment.
However, private housing initiatives are on the increase across the country. There are chronic shortages of social housing in almost every electoral constituency. International and domestic employers are cutting wages and laying people off wholesale. Migrant workers are being treated as slaves and, inevitably, the weakest and most vulnerable of our fellow citizens are literally dying on the streets.
This is happening in a country which has generated untold amounts of money over the last 10 years and which has, as previous reports on this website have highlighted, given away one of its greatest economic assets in the Corrib gas field, with no benefit whatsoever going to the average Irish citizen, much less the man, woman or child dying on the street.
The poverty gap between rich and poor in the Twenty-Six Counties is second only to the most accelerated model of capitalism in the world, the USA. Whereas in the Six Counties the historically poor regions remain poor, with the 13 worst wards in terms of multi-deprivation remaining in west Belfast, a statistic unchanged for decades and mirrored across other towns and cities.
There is the added factor of institutional sectarianism in the British occupied Six Counties, which according to a report released by the Committee For The Administration Of Justice in 2005, still leaves catholics 1 ½ times more likely to be unemployed than protestants. Inequality along sectarian lines still leaves massive deprivation and unemployment differentials, yet the working class protestant also has much to fear as CAJ’s Rhetoric and Reality Report 2005 outlines:
“Although community differentials in the proportions of workless households are decreasing, this seems to be because the poorest protestant households are moving closer towards the same level of exclusion as their catholic counterparts, rather than a sign of any general improvement in the situation.”
Landlords and ruthless employers prey on us all under the eyes of two political regimes that are either indifferent or complicit in the massive economic inequalities, which permeate through all of Irish society.
If it is true that the worth of a society should be judged by the way in which it treats its most vulnerable citizens then this most recent revelation is an indictment upon an Irish governmental infrastructure which has forgotten all that was asked for when men and women fought and died in 1916.
The democratic program of 1919 asserted that it would be the duty of an Irish government to
“Promote the development of the Nation’s resources, to increase the productivity of its soil, to exploit its mineral deposits, peat bogs, and fisheries, it’s waterways and harbours in the interests and for the benefit of the Irish people.’