Homeless is Hopeless

"Homelessness is too often accompanied by hopelessness", that was one of the ideas floated across a packed theatre in The Institute yesterday morning, by Fr Peter McVerry the Voice of the Homeless in Ireland. He is a Jesuit priest who, many years ago was working with school drop-outs in Dublin. One day he found one of his charges, a 9 year old boy, sleeping rough. It was huge eye-opener for the good father as he realised that you'd be at nothing trying to keep kids in school if they don't have a home to go to after school's out. The event shook his certainties and he shifted his focus to set up what eventually became the Peter McVerry Trust. I mentioned him a couple of times last year [bloboprev] getting angry but not truculent about the unwillingness of the Irish government to build homes. For him anger is a driver for change.

McVerry was down with us to launch Volunteer Day at the Institute where students, and others, are encouraged to give a bit of time to Fairtrade; or horse-riding with the disabled; or meals on wheels; or the local hospice; or sorting books for Oxfam. He started off by explaining why he had given a life-time to others

• it was the christian, or at least the humanitarian, thing to do
• to express gratitude for the fortunate circumstances of his birth which gave him huge potential . . . if I hadn't joined the Jesuits as a young man. The obvious way to express his thanks was to give back.
• He noted that these push-pulls had been widespread among the religious in his time. Sadly the implementation of humanitarian protocols had been completely un-audited and so had too often degenerated into abusive relationships.
• every day he gets some rewarding feedback. Those endorphins are their own reward. Heck, they'd have to; because these guys aren't driving BMWs between their homeless-hostels.

To a hammer everything looks like a nail, you may say, but McVerry makes a good case that having a home is the prerequisite for a) health [TB is on the rise in Dublin rough-sleepers] b) happiness - rates of depression are higher in hostels than in age matched 'homed' people c) productivity - it's hard to apply for a job if you don't have a return-address and it's much harder to hold one down if you can't get a clean shirt together.  Yes, yes, not all homeless people are deranged drug-abusers: the PMcVT has on its books homeless students and homeless professionals. and only a minority of their client base has addiction issues. But these things are globally relative. In Ireland, contra Bangladesh, everyone has access to clean potable water; although we're unwilling to pay for it. Without clean water you don't reach adulthood in many cases; you're dead of the flux before housing becomes an issue.

Later with a rhetorical flourish the old chap (he's 74 but definitely not retired) asked us what was, for those directly affected, the hardest part of homelessness:

• not the absence of a regular bed; 
• not the boredom of endless days sitting around without purpose; 
• not the hunger or junk food. 

What matters most to the homeless is the feeling that nobody cares whether they live or die. It is a strong policy in the PMcVT that

• phone calls are always returned;
• stories are always listened to;
• respect is always shown. 

Even if there is no bed, no sleeping bag, no food parcel, you don't get the door shut in your face.

Challenged by change
And here's the thing, volunteers are generous with their time, yes, but they also benefit from the relationship. They are changed by the encounters with the dispossessed and if they can take the stress of dealing with such troubles, they are changed for the better; on the basis of what kills not, fattens, if no other. If you are the least bit open to The Other, then your certainties, your values, your prejudice will be challenged. Like US Army grunts who fought next to compatriots of a different colour, and came out realising that white people could be kind and some black people were real crap at the blues. For McVerry himself a key moment was when a young chap told him "The fact that god might exist depresses me" which McV took to mean that the boy felt he was always being judged and found wanting / sinful / bad: that his condition was his fault. The priest absorbed this and turned his face from the god of judgement [R] with whom he'd grown up towards a god of compassion.

Now let's be a bit critical of the PMcVT and its work: they're big enough. In 1980s Britain, the weekly satirical cartoon programme Spitting Image mercilessly guyed the royal family, celebrities and, in particular Margaret Thatcher's conservative government. A case has been made that Spitting Image, which had HUGE viewership each week, acted as a safety valve that prevented a revolution against the divisive changes that were being imposed on the British people.  If Peter McVerry and his Trust did not exist, maybe the government would be compelled to vindicate the constitutional rights of all its citizens. That would require a revolution, of course, we'd have to pay more tax, and the useless mouths of the quangocracy would have to find useful work outside the public service. I've been agonising about the ethics of the voluntariat since at least May 2014. But then you may not believe that the government is capable of organising anything more challenging than ordering posters for the next election. If homelessness hurts then you just have to roll up your sleeves and do what you can. For Peter McVerry, like fellow christian Martin Luther [prev], he can do no other.

Fr McVerry talked about how the people in his Trust, by giving time, respect, homes, support, food and hope to the dispossessed, receive as much back in self-esteem and a sense of worth. Thus give and take become an exchange. That resonated with me strongly because last week I'd seen a fascinating video about Proto-Indo European and what we can deduce about the culture of these our ancestors from linguistic analysis. It turns out the PIE word for give is the same as the word for receive/take! Exchange to mutual benefit is in our DNA. I barrelled up to him  after his talk and shared this insight to him, which meant I got to shake his hand - an honour.

The Peter McVerry Trust is in the middle of a fund-raiser:

Donate?

A view from the basement

I was up in The Smoke on Thursday hangin' with my mates at the annual VIBE meeting. At one of the coffee breaks, a couple of mothers were comparing notes about the availability of schools in their area: it's headache because about 90% of primary schools are owned and operated by the Catholic church although paid for out of general taxation (and whatever they can soak out of the parents for enriching the educational experience). The Catholic schools give priority to Catholic families who live in the catchment area and protestant, muslim and agnostic tax-paying parents get the seats that are left, if any. Dilemma: Should the parents take out a second mortgage to pay for private school or spend hours in the car each week schlepping little Jimmy to a distant but right-on and inclusive Educate Together school? I said smugly that we hadn't that problem because our girls never went to school at all at all. To which the fair-enough response was "Well that is predicated on having at least one parent who wasn't working". My rejoinder was that if you live simple, you maybe don't need two salaries to put food on the table and shoes on the feet.  That was rather disingenuous because the major outgoing transaction in most family budgets in Ireland is money for roof. We are a long way from the situation 100 years ago in Rotterdam where I have been advised that in those days folks typically allocated 1/7th of their after-tax income to rent. One of The Beloved's sisters lived in London in the 1980s and bought a house in salubrious Chiswick, payments for which consumed all of His salary and half of Hers.

That was London. At the same time we bought a house in the NE of England in 1986: a rather run down 150 sq.m. red-brick terrace about 90 years old. We were not in the business of making a killing on the market so, of the 20-25 properties we viewed that Summer, we bought the second cheapest. The very cheapest had a hole in the roof and pigeons in the attic. Our gaff cost £21,000. Four years later, we moved back to Ireland and put our slightly improved and much loved home on the market. It fetched £56,000! We could have taken everyone's advice in '86 to buy the most expensive property we could afford - maybe £60K - and seen that more than double in price. But we didn't because we were thrifty and risk-averse. Back then we could live comfortably on one salary although for much of the time we were both earning and so salting away some extra cash for the future.

We thus acquired >!windfall!< a chunk money to put towards a home in Ireland. Not through hard work or canny practice - just by catching a wave of rising prices induced by various manipulations of the market by the economic policies of Margaret Thatcher. Tomorrow belonged to me. I was back at work last week and chatted to one of my office mates. He is trying to get the paper work sorted so that he can move his family to a bigger house in which each child has its own bedroom - a perfectly normal reasonable aspiration in today's Ireland. The new house is 399. That's casual code for €400,000 . . . for a 4 bed house in a crumby midlands town close to the centre of Ireland; albeit only a price-driving 80 km railway commute from Dublin. We bought a farm of land and 1/24th of a mountain for €77,000 20 years ago!

My colleague can do that because he already has equity in his existing house and by trading-up needs only pay for the differential. The new PhD graduate who will take my job when I retire in a few years time, could no more get finance for €400,000 than s/he could run to Kilkenny and back before classes. My generation has robbed her generation of the chance to live in a decent house despite having middle class academic aspirations like a room for each child or a scrap of garden to have a swing and a rabbit-hutch.

This was all brought into focus by hearing Fr Peter McVerry [on the Left as befitting and with an edgy urban background] on the wireless [again!] about homelessness in Ireland. He was being given air-time because, on Tuesday 6th Sept 2016 TONIGHT, RTE is putting out a documentary A view from the basement about his work with the Peter McVerry Trust. McVerry has spent the last 30+ years working stridently against homelessness and government indifference to the Dispossessed. His Trust has started building homes because nobody else is. Interviewer "Isn't that the Government's Job?". McVerry replied that he'd been on a fact-finding mission to Derry, North of the borrrder. The population of Derry is more or less 2% that of the Republic of Ireland and they have plans to complete 1,000 units of social housing this year.
Q. In 2015, across all the local authorities of RoI, how many S.H. units were built?
A. 74.
Q. What is the Irish for Shame?
A. náire

A view from the basement is a McVerry metaphor for modern Ireland. Imagine a fine red-brick Georgian house in Dublin, long since carved up into flats. The Man lives on the top floor. In the morning, he flings open the curtains to greet the day. The Summer sun is up, the breeze is shickering the leaves on the old apple tree at the bottom of the garden, the grass of the lawn is more green than can be easily imagined, the sun picks out the Fine Gael blue speedwell Veronica arvenis that makes the lawn seem greener still. There is dew on the grass but it only seems to rain at night. At the same time in the basement of the same house, a woman also opens her curtains. She is too far down to see the lawn or the apple-tree, her view is bounded by the whitewashed wall of the outhouse. It has rained overnight and there is 10 cm of standing water between her and the toilet.

The Man at the top of the house is everyone who has a job with a pension, who bought their home more than 20 years ago, whose children go to fee-paying schools and expect to go to university and expect Mammy and The Da to pay the fees and the rent when they leave home for college. The Man makes all the rules and regulations for everyone, assigns the tax-breaks, sets housing policy, runs the [independent] judiciary and the [independent] trade unions. According to the OECD, the top 10% in Ireland earn 7.4x the bottom 10%. This is marginally less iniquitous than the OECD average but that's still a LOT of inequality.

St Laserian of Leighlin Sunday

St Laserian, local saint: his feast-day today

• The Flemings take down the ould bodhrán
• Fair tocks to Mr Fleming
• The Gardiners hoofing the bróg chniogrince for StPs
• Tommy Tiernan: Peter McVerry: you can Trust him
• HMG-UK: Lord Willie Hay - can't trust him
• Elsewhere
• John Oliver: caring for the elderly [spoiler: Frankly Scarlett]
• Just one day without Dale
• Dr Mabry: talking bridges, engineering
• B1M: talking tunnels, cruise-ships
• Twins separated at birth + DNA + FB + hugs
• Werner Herzog - Legend!

Living National Treasure

It has been a mad week for visiting celebs at The Institute. On Monday we had the Minister of Omerta, about whom I can tell you nothing. Wednesday was Volunteers Day  which  brought a number of Do Good organisations out of the woodwork and into the main concourse to drum up support among The Youth. The day was spear-headed by the Pres of our Student's Union and Father Trendy, our Between the two of them, they managed to bring Sr Stanislaus Kennedy of the Irish Sisters of Charity down to address the Voluntariat at 11.00am. Last year, they brought down Fr Peter McVerry and I was inspired by him too. By great good fortune, I had a clear window in my busy Wednesday schedule at that time, so didn't need to cancel class. Everyone has heard of Sr Stan, but a smaller number have heard her speak at length about the history of social justice in Ireland. In a sense that history is herstory, because when took her vows in 1958 aged 18 there were no state social services except unemployment benefit. If you were homeless, abused, deranged, alcoholic, foodless, friendless or just plain poor, you were on your own unless someone took pity on you and brought you to hospital or The County Home.  Regrettably the main source of such charity was the Catholic Church and strings of dependence and humility, not to say humiliation came with the territory. The deserving poor were looked after by the patriarchy so long as they didn't transgress the rules; especially the rules about extra-marital sex [see Magdalen Laundry etc.].

With the encouragement of her boss Peter Birch (the Catholic Bishop of Ossory, the top prelate in Kilkenny) young Stanislaus started changing the invisible certainties of those dark days. Bp Birch had attended the Vatican II confab in Rome in the early 60s where he met and was influenced by a clatter of Liberation Theology radicals from South America. These people stirred a generous handful of Marxist dialectic into the gruel of the Church doctrine believing that they owed a greater duty of care to the dispossessed than to The Man and the status quo. Bishop Birch encouraged and helped finance the natural inclination of young Sr Stan [L looking ever so slightly unhinged?] to do the right thing. . . . She set up the first Meals-on-Wheels system in the World for poor lonely old people. The same building housed a laundry run by volunteer students to save pensioners from sudsing their sheets in the kitchen sink. Not all the laundries of the day were judgemental abusive hell-holes for sinners   [see Magdalen Laundry etc.]. Then she moved into mental health and mental handicap provision: setting up Ireland's first special needs school and a workshop for the disabled  integrated with the now multimega Kilkenny Design shop.

After 20 years a-growing in Kilkenny she moved to Dublin where there were a lot more homeless people to succour. A transformative event was when she went and spent a year hanging out with a group of homeless women, living their life and giving ear to their stories. Even the existence of homeless women was incredible to the hierarchy (and indeed most people) because they didn't fill the imagined demographic. Homeless people were men with a drink problem, not women with a poverty problem or a thumping husband problem. Something that Sr Stan has learned along her difficult path is that most people, most of the time, cannot see the problem until someone provides a solution. Then they are all over it: contributing their time, their contacts, their celebrity, their money. Last Friday, for example, the rich and famous were paying for the privilege of spending a night of the streets at the annual Shine a Light Gig. But when Sr Stan really needed support, when she wrestled with the intractable, ghastly nightmares of inequality, inequity and iniquity . . . then she was on her own.

I have expressed my reservations about The Voluntariat. I can't quite sit comfortable with the idea of spending €2,000 for a week on the Camino de Santiago under an arrangement where half your money goes to Focus Ireland and half to self-indulgence. The transaction feels wrong because I've shed fat and certainties while I trudging across the high plains of La Meseta Central under a broiling sun [and on a lot less than €130/day] . Here's a thought, give all the freakin' money to Focus, leave your baggage [actual, metaphorical and cultural] behind and walk a transformation in yourself. At least, this Camino wheeze makes no pretence about doing good out foreign, Voluntourism [n. Shipping white folks to the Third World where they get in the way because they bring a lot of cultural baggage and no useful skills] is worse.

Focus Point, which developed into Focus Ireland was her first big project in Dublin and it grew directly from her experience with those homeless women. Focus may not have been able to find homes for everyone who came through the doors but it did provide a welcome, a nice cup of tea, loads of advice and a civilised meal at rock bottom prices. You couldn't get a bowl of gruel at Focus Point even if you asked for it and the soup came with croutons - because everyone deserves croutons. For the dispossessed, money is much less important than to be recognised as a man and a brother; unless you prefer to be recognised as a woman and a sister. Sr Stan voted Yes on Marriage Equality in 2015, so I guess Focus will endeavour to recognise you in your essential self, in all its current diversity. That is not the same as applying a label with a box on it for ticking.

Focus was about the homeless, and when the urgency of that problem abated, Sr Stan saw that immigrants were similarly getting the bum's rush, so she set up ICI the Immigrant Council of Ireland to look at some of their problems but only through the eyes of a pragmatic, useful and compassionate solution. But see also Nasc.

In 1998, Sr Stan acquired a 1/5th of a hectare of land on Stanhope Street to set up The Sanctuary, an ecumenical place of stillness [R a glimpse of the garden] in the heart of the bustling city. Why, The Beloved ran sat a Mindfulness Session there a tuthree years ago because The Sanctuary encourages that sort of thing.

Heck-&-jimminy, any one of these ventures would secure Sr Stan's place in paradise and her responsibilities to so many organisations could get to be either an empire or a burden. But, like myself, she believes in retire early and retire often. She has retired from each of her extraordinarily creative domains in turn lest it grow into her own shape . . . and no further. By handing over the reins to another person a new dimension of possibility, previously invisible, is created and allowed to develop.

For me as a scientist, a final really important revelation from her talk is how much Sr Stan and her organisations are committed to evidence. If they secure any money for payroll, one of the first hires is often a researcher to find things out - as they really are; which is rarely as they should be; or as we complacently imagine them to be.

Sister Stan

Living National Treasure 

人間国宝 Ningen Kokuhō !

Footnotes on invisible certainties.

One Sep Sun Bit Wol

Bubo bubo [R]

• What wouldn't you do for your [Angelman] son?
• Aphantasia explained by Ian "TCD" Robertson [bloboprev]
  
• Gott Betrunken im Himmel - Ryanair deplores drunken passengers
• What is a unit of alcohol? ♀♂ edition
  
• Parting glass - Onóir 
• Matthew & The Atlas ~ I Will Remain
•  ≋≋≋≋
• Fenit tombolo 
  
• The Death of Lough Neagh
• Mackerel? Only Irish & Asians need apply their forks
• Long lining Halibut Greenland
• Martin's Boat - Colorado R dory [been here before]
• Boats? curving the strakes in the forest
  
• Skara brae . . . neighboring Brogdar prev
• Hot-lime pointing a tumble-down Irish cottage
• Peter McVerry [multibloboprev] Trust goes $henanigan$ tsk!
  

Anti-pregabalin pilgrimage

Book Review

The Salt Path

Optional background: Don't Give Up 

Peter Gabriel & Paula Cole

Ray and Moth were /are like us, with similar off-centre aspirations: to find and run their own gaff and see what it was like to live a more immediate life: where the hens laid eggs just in time for the children's tea. They weren't interested in making sensible contributions to their pension as a hedge against an uncertain future in old age and infirmity. That's one way to progress; although reg'lar people wouldn't see much 'progress'.  Accumulating a fat pension pot usually goes with a high octane life-style: climbing the corporate ladder because the increments seemed necessary to support the stuff that you need to spend money on. Sometimes you can only get ahead by having the kit [suit, car, shoes, the right sunglasses] that shows you deserve it.

Anyway, Ray and Moth made their bed and lay in it and had two children and a small holding with sheep and chickens and a few paying-guests in the restored barn. It was hard work, living remote in Wales, but that's what they wanted. Somewhere along the way they invested some cash in a business venture of one of Moth's oldest friends. The business failed and the legal small-print said that Ray and Moth would, not only lose all the money they invested, but were jointly and severally liable for all the debts of failed company. After wasting a further three years of life and all their remaining money on lawyers; their home, their farm, their B&B business, everything was all repossessed by the Corporate Patriarchy and they were thrown out on the road with nothing but a peculiar tax-credit / windfall / pension of £48 /week.
That same week Moth was given a name - corticobasal degeneration CBD - to attach to a peculiar set of neurological conditions which had been dogging his active life. Imagine a toxic melange of motor neurone disease ALS, Parkinson's PD and multiple sclerosis MS. CBD, as the second word implies, gets worse as time goes on; the connexions between brain, nerves and muscles get progressively more wonk until sepsis or pneumonia finishes you off because the lungs can't clear themselves. It takes 7 ± 2 years from first presentation to final curtain. Ray and Moth go into denial, as you do when you get a terminal diagnosis. But also because it is now 6+ years since first symptoms and Moth is a long way from being dead.
Could it be something else? they ask.
I am the Consultant! the Consultant replies.
He can't be much more use because CBD is incurable but he give Moth a script for Lyrica / Pregabalin, which we have met before. Pregabalin, (and the alternate treatment for CBD Clonazepam) gives a boost to GABA γ-amino butyric acid, the most well known inhibitory neurotransmitter. But extra GABA will bring a truly frightening array of side-effects [full list] including tremors, vertigo, dry mouth, constipation, vomiting, flatulence, erectile dysfunction, fatigue, peripheral oedema, abnormal walking. That shows you some of the task list for GABA around the body - one of the great multitaskers. It also shows what a blunt instrument oral pharmaceuticals are.  It's like killing a woodlouse with a shot-gun: you may kill the woodlouse but there is a lot of collateral damage to innocent bystanders. On a human level, those symptoms don't give the best launch to a 1000km back-packing camping trip in SW England. But that's what Ray impulsively decides they must do, and soon. The next Summer, as soon as they gather their traps, they start off on the South West Coastal Path from Minehead to Poole and every tide in between:
Vertigo for the cliffs; flatulence and vomiting for inside the tent; oedema in the legs for the walking; erectile dysfunction & fatigue for their intimate relations; tremors for taking notes on the wildlife; and constipation for holding a really crap hand dealt by fate. Neither of them is young any more and their progress, certainly to begin with, is painfully slow and, well, painful. With limited resources [except in bottle!], they inch along the map in their SWCP guidebook. It is a long time between showers, and they would rather eat than use a laundrette because their money won't stretch to both.

It's an interest apolitical political book. It exposes government delusions about the state of homelessness in England: wilfully undercounting those who cannot afford to put a roof over their heads in post-Thatcher Britain. This selective blindness allows The Man and the comfortable middle-classes to believe that all homeless people are druggies and alkies whom nobody can help. Several times in the book it is made clear that dogs especially my dogs are privileged over dispossessed people. More worryingly othering the homeless allows a yobbier, younger jugend to urinate on people curled up in shop doorways because they are untermensch. The standard reaction to homeless people is to shrink away from them or give them a sandwich - because money would only go towards the next bottle of Thunderbird [BBC's take]. My research reveals SocksAndChocs which supplies that sort of thing to the homeless. As Peter McVerry explained to us two years ago, the very best thing you can do for The Down is to recognise them: eye-contact, a greeting, a comment on the weather . . . like you'd do for the bus-driver or the check-out lady. There are people who refuse water - which falls from the skies, after all - to Ray and Moth when asked for it. It won't surprise you to hear that Moth is in the habit of giving his last few coins to someone who patently needs it more than he does.
Q. How do water-refusniks sleep at night?
A. Just fine because their cold-sore is much more distressing than His stigmata.
The Salt Path was a Sunday Times bestseller: you may hope that people come for the escapism of this week's travel book and stay to look at their own reactions to those insufficiently fortunate to be able to buy a £7 book. Indeed the cost of the book is almost exactly the same as Ray and Moth had budgetted each day for ALL their needs. I reflect often on the fact that I am comfortable, sitting on my own sofa in a reasonably warm, dry house simply from the accident of being born in the 1950s. We could buy a home in England in 1986 for £21,000 when my annual salary was £16,000 = ratio 1.3x. 30 years later Dau.II is looking at a home/income ratio of about 15x. It is iniquitous!

The other arresting sub-plot in the Salt Road is that Moth and Ray realise that they've left his spare vial of Pregabalin meds on the garage floor by mistake when packing their bare essential kit. Without the  medicine which the consultant is sure is the only thing between Moth and perdition, Moth begins to make a miraculous recovery. From being barely able to walk and in constant pain, he limbers up and recovers his libido enough to have some beachy bouncy bouncy with a delighted Ray. They surmise that it must be the oxygen as well as allowing his neurotransmitter to return to a more potent equilibrium.

On the very last day of their walk, a positive encounter with a random stranger lands them a place to live within commuting distance of Plymouth where the miraculously revitalised Moth has enrolled for college. In that flat Ray knuckles down to write her book which is its own small miracle. Those of us who have been transformed by pilgrimage are not richer or more sucessful but have shed a few certainties - and probably a few kilos - along the way. Ray gets to appreciate that Home is a state of mind more than a roof of slate.

Here's a fair-enough executive summary of The Salt Road and its back-story. Penguin's inner view with Raynor Winn.

Entitlements

My Aged Father-in-Law Pat the Salt was born in 1925 and turned 66 and eligible for the Old Age Pension 25 years ago. He and his wife worked brutal long hours in the catering trade and shifted their caboodle every few years looking for work as one enterprise after another came to an end. As they got older, their accumulated experience didn't seem to count for much and certainly didn't count for more money at the end of the week. But it wasn't in them to give up and expect the Gum'ment to look after them. At one point during the recession of the 1980s after a few months between jobs, living on unemployment benefit, Pat up-stakes and went to England to look for work. When he returned six months later, he was told that this evidence of enterprise was going to result in a decrease in his dole because, by leaving the jurisdiction, his clock was zeroed. Whatever! When they finally reached the mystical, mythic age of 66, they could finally relax from the relentless round of looking for work and working and draw the Old Age Pension OAP. It was like Christmas . . . every week. They blessed St Patrick and The Man for this state of their affairs and were really grateful and appreciative of what they got. Every Wednesday night he would take out an envelope and address it as Pat's Entitlements, ready to receive the Pension the next morning at the Post Office. He didn't, however, have any sense of entitlement: just gratitude and certain sense of bemusement that someone was looking after them.

The Department of Social Protection DSP is what runs both the OAPension and the various schemes for allocating different amount of money to different categories of people who are #without but are not yet eligible for the pension. There is a bewildering array of schemes: Job Seeker's Allowance is not the same as Job Seeker's Benefit. You get different money either side of your 25th birthday. You can get a medical card to defray the costs of your medical expenses if you qualify under any one of a number of arcane rules. You may apply for Rent Supplement or Back to Education Allowance or a Carer's Allowance if your mum is real sick. It goes on and ever more specific and confusing and the Department employs a lot of people to make sure nobody gets an allowance to which they are not entitled. Needless to say, nobody is employed to make sure poor Joe Public gets his full whack. The 2017 budget allocation for DSP is just shy of €20,000,000,000 or about 37% of the total government spend. This dwarfs all the other departments, even the bottomless pit of Health which only clocks at €14bn = 26%. And I get a whack out of cost item #3 Education €9bn = 16%. These, the Big Three, take 4/5th of all the money to spend.

As an aside, you need to know how many of us are crowded into our Fair Republic. Here are the figures from the 2011 census. The total population has increased by about 0.2 million over the last 6 years but I'm guessing the proportions are the same.

0 - 14 years	979,590
teens	290,125
15 - 24 years	580,250
students	290,125
25 - 44 years	1,450,140
45 - 64 years	1,042,879
65 years +	535,393
adults	3,318,537
kids+teens	1,269,715

Total= 4.6 million [2011 remember]. I've arbitrarily split the weird grouping of 15-24 year-olds half&half into teens = still at school and 'students' at college and counted only this latter group as part of 'adults'. I'd like to believe that I am a productive member of society, earning my keep by educating students in science and assertiveness. But a number of our students are wasting everybody's time by scraping through exams and causing accidents in the lab; or worse, being on the books and getting a grant from the government but mitching off from class and drinking themselves to oblivion. If these, say, 20% of our students left, then my job would be redundant on a last-in, first-out basis and I'd have to work elsewhere to be a nett contributor to the tax-pot rather than, as now, a nett taker sucking at the government teat.

A radical idea has been in the air in the run up to Christmas, to streamline the desperately complex, and inherently unfair system of Entitlements. One proposal is to give every adult of working age €150 tax-free as of right whether you work, or care for your demented father, or write poetry, or run a soup kitchen or sit on your sofa watching box-sets and drinking tinnies until the cash runs out. On €150/week you can just about pay your share of the rent, and not starve. If you want to go to a concert, or a session in the boozer, or fly to Prague for the weekend then you have to get off your arse and find some work. For those of us on [just barely, me] €50K/yr, €150 isn't very much: €150 x 52 = €7,800 a year.  Multiply that by 3.3 million adults and you get €26 billion which is within a shout of what is allocated currently to the Department of Social Protection DSP. Here's the polemic and the costing for a model of Universal Basic Income UBI put forward by a group of Marxists called Social Justice Ireland. SJI's model a bit more complex than €150 each because they recognise that old people's expenses are greater mostly because of the meds and zimmer frames that keep them alive forever . . . so they get more: you cannot make the grey vote unhappy and expect to win an election.

There is much to like about this

• Sacking all the Jobsworths at the DSP, so they can no longer tsk tsk at the inability of the dispossessed to manage their bennies. From their comfortable chair in a warm office, counting the time until they cash in for a generous pension, they will become redundant to see if they can do something positive for the economy or their fellow citizens.
• My poor students can complete their assignments on time and turn up to 9 o'clock lectures because they no longer need to work 4 nights a week or all weekend to pay the rent.
• My poetic daughter - yes I have one - can freeze in a garret holding her pen with fingerless gloves. She may be cold but at least she's not starving and can afford to buy a pot of ink each week.
• My pal can look after his disabled mother without having to fill in forms in triplicate and prove that his mother is still alive at the end of each month.

I suggest that these changes, facilitated by UBI, may improve the social capital of the nation. More poetry, more science, more plays, more wood-craft for kids.  We can park the pervading weltanschauung of the Protestant Work Ethic that nobody deserves a hand-out and TNSTAAFL. In a way it is the ultimate in letting the market find its own level: folks will do what seems good to them rather than the state making a hames of deciding what everyone should do and dicking about with the tax-system to encourage people to do what The Man considers to be The Right Thing. The wisdom of the crowds may win out here and we get just enough poets, lawyers and engine-drivers and everyone approaches a life that enhances their true self. Take compulsory education now - after 12 years in school half my Yr 1 students don't know aNNything that is useful to them or which makes them productive members of society: can't bake a cake, butcher a hog, saw a plank in half, cut someone's hair or lawn, or change a diaper. The home educated young adults I know can do those things or find someone who can and barter their own skills against.

It is interesting that some of the most media-friendly proponents of UBI are Catholic priests [who have no time for black Protestants or their devilish  Work Ethic?] who are harking back to the radical doctrines of Liberation Theology from the end of the last century. We've met Fr Peter McVerry before; the other one to check out on the airwaves is Fr Sean Healy. Not everyone agrees with the ethos or the economics of this solution for dealing with poverty. But we're going to hell in a bucket with the current business model, so let's toss up some new ideas and see if any stick to the ceiling.