I remember a number of years ago listening to the late Marian Finucane interviewing a psychologist about family issues. It was close to Christmas and they were dealing with the question of how to handle family stress when the house is full and the season of goodwill turns into one of bad temper.
was listening with a friend who worked in a disadvantaged urban community. At the end of the interview the psychologist said: “I wouldn’t worry too much about it, in a few days it will be over, and the kids will be back to ballet and rugby and all the normal things.”
My friend shook his head. “I was hoping,” he said, “some of the people I work with were listening to that — there was great wisdom there, but that last comment made the entire thing irrelevant to them. Ballet and rugby are not ‘normal things’ in that community.”
There’s a lot of talk these days about ‘the squeezed middle’, those ‘who get up early in the morning and pay for everything’.
There is no doubt that the middle classes do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to generating economic activity and providing human resources for public services.
There are various levels to the middle classes, from blue collar to CEO, from small farmers to veritable ranchers, from tradespeople to developers, from shopkeepers to retailers. And then there are all the professions and the multitude of public servants of one kind or another as well as artists, writers and academics, most of whom are cradled and reared in the middle classes.
The key life priorities of this large cohort include house ownership, education and career, with house ownership being key. While the cohort may experience itself as ‘squeezed’, in terms of taxation and expectations, in the day-to day shaping of society it is the most influential and its preoccupations set the agenda.
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There are, of course, the super-rich, whose lives and lifestyles are beyond what most of us can imagine, but whose decisions about what they do with their money can affect us all. They are not the focus of my attention in this piece, but I want to acknowledge their influence and say, where there are super-rich people there will inevitably be super-poor people — if some have a lot more, others will have a lot less because we live on a planet with finite resources.
Now, around the edges of the squeezed middle are the marginalised and disadvantaged, living in poorly serviced housing estates or spartan, isolated rural houses.
These are households where long-term unemployment, educational underachievement and lingering ill-health combine to create a real sense that they are on the outside and destined to be the tuppences on whom the tuppence-ha’pennies will forever look down.
They speak a different language to those in the middle: they talk about HAP, CWO, SVP, Rent Allowance, Fuel Allowance, Carer’s Allowance, Back to School Allowance and more.
In the squeezed middle we talk about mortgages, mortgage interest relief, college fees, APR, CAO, BIK, VAT, VHI, Laya, UCD, UL, ACRES, TAMS, SFP and more.
It is interesting to note that the schemes and funds delivered to those on the edges are designed and delivered by those in the middle. The academics, social scientists and civil servants designing them, the politicians passing them into law and the social and community workers delivering them are all from the middle class.
But things are changing: the housing crisis is causing us all to speak a common language. Words like eviction, rent arrears, couch surfing, homelessness and hopelessness are now becoming part of the middle-class vernacular.
Meanwhile, political leaders claim to be all but helpless in the face of this increasing dispossession and the crass capitalism that’s leaving the children of this generation with little hope of ever owning a house.
This version of capitalism is visible in all its amorality in a property market where nameplate funds with enormous purchasing power can buy up swathes of properties and blow ordinary prospective homeowners out of the market.
The great framework that protects the interests of the citizens as individuals and as a collective is the constitution. One of its key functions is to keep a balance between individual rights and the common good.
Enshrined in Article 43 is the right to private property and along with it, the proviso that the State can delimit by law this right in order to reconcile it with the common good.
A clear majority in the Dáil has no appetite for tampering with the supremacy of the right to private property, and the definition of the common good is as loose as a marquee in a gale.
It is time for a Citizens’ Assembly to look at proposing a way of constitutionally balancing the two. This would be a first and fundamental step towards ensuring that in our country, one of the basic human needs — the need for shelter — becomes a right.