Rosita Sweetman: I was poor when the country was — being poor in a rich Ireland must be torture
Being 'poor' is miserable. Being poor in an affluent society is torture.
Ireland is now, statistically, one of the richest countries in the world - but child poverty, or children in consistent poverty, has increased by an astonishing 78% in the past year, according to a new report. And renting a house, never mind buying a house, for you and your children, has never been more difficult.
This week the Government serendipitously announced its plans for the housing market where rents on Daft show new build apartments in Dublin (seemingly made mostly of MDF) are €2,300 for a single bed, €3,500 for a double.
So what does our delightful new government do?
Sadly, far from beating their breasts, saying, our nation's children should not be in 'consistent poverty', our lovely young people should not be beggaring themselves to rent or buy a home, our old people should definitely not be forced to sell their homes and go into so-called 'homes' where they could be neglected or even unsafe, the Government plan to bring in legislation that will enable landlords to raise rents even higher.
They say it's the only way to increase supply.
In a way, it's not surprising.
We've been bastards to each other over property ever since the Famine, when Gombeenism, (ie taking over your dying or emigrating neighbour's gaff) signalled the birth of native capitalism. It's a tradition so ingrained that many of our politicians run side hustles as landlords.
Remember the Celtic Tiger, when Bertie and Co whipped the country into a frenzy of acquisition that everyone knew was going to end in a massive crash? And when the crash hit the property boys circled the wagons, bailed out the banks, created Nama.
Welfare was slashed. Supports for the vulnerable were slashed. Social and affordable builds came to a stop. Hospitals and schools had their budgets shaved to the bone. New entrants to teaching, nursing, the police, the civil service got salaries a fraction of their predecessors'. Housing regeneration projects in the most deprived areas were abandoned.
To top it all the 'poor' were openly derided. Remember a plush, well fed Leo Varadkar and his 'Welfare cheats cheat us all?' schtick? A slogan that whitewashed the reality: since the crash the wealthy have been increasing their take, worldwide. A 2024 Oxfam report showed that billionaire wealth increased by €13 billion in 2024, or €35.6 million per day. It's the dodgy ground on which our current crisis is built.
Poverty in the 90s
Going through papers and photograph albums recently for my memoir, ' Girl with a fork in a world of soup', I was struck over and again how poor my children and I were in the 90s when my marriage crashed.
We were lucky in one way, I'd managed to keep our home (despite vigorous attempts to ensure the opposite by my ex), we had a roof over our heads.
But with the charmingly named 'Deserted Wives Allowance' then IR£69 a week, heating the house was not possible. Mould marched the walls. Eating right was not possible either. We went from proper hot dinners to yellow pack pizzas. All our clothes came from charity shops. I had unpaid bills in every small supermarket for miles.
"Everything in this house is broken," said the son of one of the school mums who came to visit. She was mortified but he was right.
You think you live in a decent society, that there will be a safety net when you fall, but no. The children and I fell and fell through a whistling void. As we went down I sold paintings, rugs, desks, cabinets, more paintings. Anything I could lay my hands on to keep us afloat.
I went to the family lawyer to find he was now working for 'the other side', ie my ex. I went to Social Welfare who said they couldn't help since I was still 'technically' married.
I went to a GP who said I should take a holiday, away from the children; I seemed "very stressed". Through gritted teeth I explained I didn't have enough money to get to the end of the week, never mind go on holiday, never mind getting someone to mind the children who anyway were also deeply traumatised and would have suffered more if I'd left.
I went to the local priest. He almost tore his soutane in half, slamming the drawer of his desk, stuffed with cheque books and see-through envelopes bulging with rolls of notes.
Once a film company used the house as a location. When their cheque for IR£1,300 was read by our local bank as IR£3,300 I whooped. Money! When the bank took me to court their representative said: "She went to DID Electrical the next day and bought a new washing machine, and a fridge!" As if I'd blown their precious loot on heroin.
Thankfully that judge was just. The case was dismissed. For once, it wasn't Josephine Soap's fault. It was the bank's. For not reading the cheque properly. Hurray!
The Dublin housing market
When, after 17 years, the children and I were forced to leave our home for other reasons, we encountered the Wild West that is the Dublin rental market. Oh boy. The first home we got was a beauty but at €2,300 a month roared through the money my mum had left us. The next house - about one tenth the size of the first - was a former groom's habitat off South Circular Road.
Then it was an old Georgian off Leinster Road with cartoonishly avaricious landlords. When we asked permission to strip out an old and stinking carpet and paint the three flights of stairs white they agreed. Then they served notice. The place looked so lovely it was going back on the market the following week at twice the price.
The next landlord was an ex-garda. When he couldn't legally hike his rent he booted us on the grounds his daughter was moving in and charged us for 'cleaning' new curtains, bringing the pine table and the sofa we'd left behind to the dump. When I looked through the window a month later there were strangers, enjoying our stuff with nary a daughter to be seen. When I tried to take up the case with the PRTB - the Private Rental Tenancies Board, it went nowhere, and of course the PRTB replaces all recourse to the courts, so that was that.
Happy Gombeening.
Rosita Sweetman: 'When, after 17 years, the children and I were forced to leave our home for other reasons, we encountered the Wild West that is the Dublin rental market. Oh boy.'
Throughout our shenanigans I had the advantage of being educated. Of having a voice, however small. Imagine the despair trying to navigate this entanglement without those advantages?
Being poor is miserable. Being poor and at the mercy of landlords who've basically been given free rein is going to be terrifying for so many. Being the child of poor parents at the mercy of this system has got to be the worst of all.
Come on Irish government. We're rich. We have billionaires amongst us. We can do better than this, for everyone. Can't we?
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- Irish Times
Micheál Martin and Paschal Donohoe are responsible for this Government's lethargy
The Taoiseach and the Minister for Finance are the key members of this Government, but they are hardly its driving force. These dynamics matter because we have a Government with power but so far neither the will nor the cohesion to deliver. All the while the world is changing rapidly and our exposure to events is growing. Micheál Martin scooped the entire electoral dividend available to the two Government parties in the last election. He has complete mastery over Fianna Fáil , but having arrived where he wanted to be over decades, he now seems unable to exercise power effectively. Paschal Donohoe is the principal Fine Gael presence in Cabinet by default. He is the crutch his leader Simon Harris reached for in a disastrous election campaign. He is indispensable in a diminished Fine Gael , yet he seems unable to exert the fiscal discipline and effective delivery of infrastructure the country needs. READ MORE Harris was permanently damaged by that election campaign and he still confuses creating distraction with effective action. Minister for Public Expenditure Jack Chambers has a claim to consideration as a force at the centre of Government. It is too soon to say for sure, but nothing yet indicates he is. The annual National Economic Dialogue on Monday offered a good analysis of the challenges we face . Tariffs and the fragmentation of the global trading system could have far-reaching consequences for the Irish economy. Foreign-owned multinationals account for 84 per cent of corporation tax revenue and around half of income tax and VAT paid by all companies in Ireland. The narrowness of our tax base means that €9 in every €10 received last year came from income tax, corporation tax and VAT. Unlike other rich countries, , we don't do any other taxes on property or wealth in scale sufficient to make a real contribution or to provide a cushion in a downturn. That is a mistake we have made before and will regret again. Worse, this Government has shrunk our domestic tax base further. In 2019, 30 per cent of income earners did not pay income tax or USC. This year that is expected to rise to 33 per cent. This would not pass for prudence in Las Vegas. In the meantime the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council estimates that Ireland's infrastructure is 25 per cent lower than average for a high-income European country. Inadequacies in water supply, sewerage and the electricity grid are barriers to building homes. Government spending more than doubled in a decade. This year spending is rapidly outpacing what was provided for in the budget last October and, oddly, the Department of Public Expenditure is not publishing monthly expenditure reports. Opening the National Economic Dialogue, the Taoiseach warned of 'unprecedented challenges', called for 'courage and ambition' and said we must prepare by 'controlling the controllables'. But what is out of control is under his authority. This is the cumulation of a decade-long, ongoing spending splurge and the failure to reform or lead the public sector. Donohoe is the continuous thread in the decline of purpose in our economic management, which, aside from our response to Covid-19, characterises that time. He accommodated skilfully under three party leaders and made the improbable plausible at a cost to the country. He seems unwilling and unavailable to engage in the combat required for cultural change and fiscal discipline in a system he too seldom challenged. In contrast to Donohoe, whose highest promotion may still be ahead, politically this is the moment of maximum Micheál Martin. Apart from 10 days in January 2011 after he resigned from Brian Cowen's cabinet and before he became leader of Fianna Fáil, he has been on his party's front bench for 30 years, its leader for 14 and in government for 19 in all. He has served his ambition by laying off risk rather than taking it on. Constantly frustrated by the system he presides over, he is also unwilling to take it on. His department is no longer the control room of that wider system which openly disparages the departments of Public Expenditure and Housing as institutionally inadequate. But the Taoiseach will not take control. Off-laying responsibility rather than taking on risk is his preferred route, Ministers – not the Taoiseach – are made to be collateral damage. By dint of dysfunction, we have an asymmetrical power structure in Government that intensifies the limitations of its principals. There are pockets of energy in departments such as Health, Justice, Higher Education and Enterprise. But as a whole, it is characterised by lethargy. Watching each other is preferred to working together. Our best hope is that another crisis might provoke an adequate response.
