It seems to me that the true heroes at Christmas are the men and women who live in B&Bs and hotels but who make something special of the day for their kids. I doubt if they ever expected to come to this, and the shock to their individual and family psychological systems must be intense.
That they are living in these circumstances is routinely attributed to the recent surge in rents, especially in the greater Dublin area. Actually, the factors that pushed them into these wretched living conditions go back at least 12 years when many of these parents were still at school.
Then, on behalf of the Fianna Fáil/PD coalition, the then minister for social and family affairs, Mary Coughlan, defended the implementation of regulations capping the rent allowance. The regulations had the inevitable result that families would end up homeless or constantly moving from place to place in search of lower rents.
All of this was pointed out to the minister and to the government at the time by organisations such as the Simon Community and Threshold, by the community welfare officers whose job was to implement the regulations, and by the opposition.
The then Labour TD Willie Penrose, in a Dáil debate in 2003, prophetically asked: “Is it not as clear as the nose on one’s face that if landlords wish to get rid of a tenant, all they have to do now is increase the rent, the arrears will mount up and they will have achieved their objective with the helping hand of the Government? Those people have nowhere to go and the result will be an increase in homelessness?”
The minister replied that, “Anything that causes difficulty for people would be a concern of [hers] . . .”
The major problem was and is that even if tenants could find family or friends or some other source to help them to top up a rent that went above the officially sanctioned level, it would be a breach of the regulations for them to do so except in certain discretionary cases. As a result, when the rent goes up, they are out on the street. The purpose of the regulation, according to Coughlan at the time, was that, “We do not want people to spend all their money on rent and not have anything left over for food and clothing.” Well, sure enough, they’re not spending all their money on rent because they can’t afford a roof over their heads.
Penrose argued instead for a cap on the rent that could be charged by landlords rather than on the amount that could be paid by tenants.
When, under the Fine Gael/Labour coalition, Labour’s Joan Burton later took over the department (renamed, spookily, the Department of Social Protection), the regulations stayed.
One consequence of this, by the way, is that families have had to move from one place to another in search of rents that fall within the department’s limits (and local community welfare officers can reduce those limits, but not increase them). That means taking children away from familiar schools, friends and environments. In my opinion, some of these children will suffer psychological and emotional problems in later life because of repeated disruptions to their familiar worlds as a result of this policy.
I’ve dwelt on this at some length because we really need to understand that real people get hurt by policy decisions that most of us are not even aware of at the time.
As we congratulate ourselves on the return of the economy to whatever it is returning to, it’s important that we stay aware of the desperate circumstances in which many parents and children find themselves because of choices made by parties representing, between them, all of us. I should declare that I have voted for a long time for one of the above-mentioned parties.
Twelve years ago nobody wanted to hear groups such as Focus Ireland, Simon or Threshold complaining. The country was in the upward spiral of a boom. Who needed to listen?
We need to listen now.
pomorain@yahoo.com
Padraig O'Morain is accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His latest book is Mindfulness on the Go. His mindfulness newsletter is free by email.