Anne Harris: The coping class is cast out. We need a stake in our country
POWERLESSNESS is a sickness of the psyche. Economic powerlessness is a sickness of the body politic. Merge these twin angsts and you have accidie -- a condition recognised in the Middle Ages as the mortal sin of despair.
Our lead story today paints a shocking picture of how our lower and middle earners are bearing the full brunt of the austerity. Over the last year those earning between €17,543 and €20,000 paid more than double the previous year's tax. Those earning between €20,000 and €30,000 pay over one third more. And those between €40,000 and €50,000 pay nearly a quarter more.
This is the group defined some years ago by Eoghan Harris in this paper as "the coping class" or recently by The Irish Times as "the squeezed middle". Whatever the definition, there is no getting away from the fact that this most respectable class of the community has been disenfranchised.
These are the people who give a nation its life force, who, with their ordinary decent human activities like spending, starting small businesses, having legitimate ambitions for their children, even dreaming their dreams, could be relied on to lead the fight against recession. Now their libido is drained. They see themselves as a castrated generation consigned to paying off negative equity -- or other debt -- until they die.
If anything would turn a country in on itself, that would. To make matters worse, this degradation of the backbone of our country is done in the service of a cynical bureaucracy, which applauds itself at black-tie dinners like that of the Dublin Chamber of Commerce in the Four Seasons last Thursday, where, in the words of Shane Ross on page 5 today, "Nama is feeding the mouths that bit the nation's prosperity, and keeping on a life- support machine, top accountants, estate agents and lawyers." Not to mention bankers.
Of course bankers must bank, builders must build and developers must develop. But in view of the carnage wreaked on this country, it should be done with a modicum of humility and decency.
The only institution displaying humility in this country right now is the Catholic Church. It has a great deal to be humble about. It has committed some of the gravest offences known to man and its struggle to acknowledge this was tardy and offensive. But it is evident that it is finally doing so and that there is a willingness to reform.
That is why the Labour Party's turning on them is incomprehensible. There is something deeply cynical about the secular screening of Education Department civil servants and the Vatican embassy posturing of Gilmore's party. It takes no courage to turn on a beaten church -- the braver thing is to take what they have to offer and use it for the benefit of the community. Cynicism is a vile disease. It cripples and corrodes and spreads like wildfire. Incredibly, thus far, those who have most reason to be cynical -- the coping class -- are devoid of it.
It's less than a year since we showed our faith in the reforming spirit of Enda Kenny. The best thing this Government has going for us is that it is not yet tired.
It has not yet fallen prey to what Enda called the Vatican sins of "dysfunction, disconnection, elitism". Connect, Enda. Hope means having a stake in our country.
Anne Harris, Editor, 'Sunday Independent'
- Anne Harris
Originally published in
