Rev. Sean Healy
JUSTICE FOR ALL
Rev. Sean Healy was one of former Finance Minister Charlie McCreevey’s fiercest critics.
Healy bats for those Tiger boom left behind
By Peter McDermott
pmcdermott@irishecho.com
DUBLIN — Seven hundred thousand people in the Republic of Ireland are poor. “That’s 18 percent,” said the Rev. Sean Healy, who is joint head of the justice commission of the Conference of Religious in Ireland. “Almost one in four households and one in every five people live in poverty. “How many of those are living in households headed by someone who’s unemployed?” he asked in a recent interview with the Echo.
It was something of a rhetorical question, put by the one-time scourge of ex-Finance Minister Charlie McCreevey.
He sat back in his chair momentarily, waiting for an answer. Books, documents and files were organized neatly on the desk in front of him. A couple of packed bookshelves take up a lot of space in his tiny office, which is in an old building owned by the Carmelite nuns in Donnybrook, Dublin — and is now headquarters for CORI, an umbrella group for the 12,000 priests, brothers and nuns who are members of religious congregations in the Republic and Northern Ireland.
The reporter guessed about half.
“Seven percent,” Healy said.
The basic lesson here was that structural poverty does not end necessarily when there are plenty of jobs. Prosperity does not lift all boats.
About a third of the households in poverty are headed by someone who’s working — whether self-employed or in a low-paid job or on a family farm. The rest, more than 60 percent, are disabled or ill, or retired, or working in the home.
Unlike most religious advocates for society’s marginalized, Healy is a policy wonk. His command of facts and figures is the envy of most politicians. And when arguing that in affluent societies the poor should not be with us still, he paints with broad strokes, too.
For instance, he said that that the four most economically competitive countries in Europe and in the top five in the world — the Netherlands and three of the Scandinavian nations — are also those with the most advanced social provision in welfare, education and accommodation.
Although it may draw some inspiration from the Northern European model, CORI’s ideas are mainly rooted in Catholic social thought. “We believe that human dignity should be a driving force in public policy,” he said.
“The level of work they do is incredible in terms of the range of issues, but also in the level of analysis,” said Charles Clark, an economics professor at St. John’s University, in Queens in New York City. “They almost always win on the points. I don’t think anybody understands the Irish budget process better than Sean.”
Clark, who spent a year working at University College Cork in the mid-1990s and has made about 30 return trips since, said that the level of debate in Ireland is helped by a number of talking-head programs, which he says are superior to “Crossfire” and its ilk in the U.S.
“You see people from the political parties actually discussing the issues,” he said. “And Sean is phenomenal on television.”
The lion’s den
Last September, the 58-year-old Healy became the center of what he called a “media circus” after it was revealed that he was to address a Fianna Fail think-in for its ministers, Dail deputies and European Parliament members at Inchydoney, in West Cork. (Secular retreats for full-time elected representative are becoming a feature of Irish political culture. Fine Gael and Labor Party also hold them.)
“It was a surprising invitation,” recalled Healy. One Sunday Business Post writer said it was like Michael Moore being asked to address the Republican Party convention.
Healy had been, over several years, a harsh critic of McCreevey, who has since taken up a post with the European Commission in Brussels. He described one year’s budget as being a “charter for the rich.” After another, he accused the minister of “double-crossing the poor.”
McCreevey, for his part, said Healy was a leader in the “poverty industry.”
In recalling the run-up to the meeting, Healy said: “Some commentators became extremely agitated, telling Fianna Fail not to listen to me.”
Others said it was cynical move by Fianna Fail, part of the cosmetic makeover forced by losses in the May local and European elections.
Healy himself found it useful. He gave a 35-minute presentation, and took questions and comments for almost two hours.
In one sense, the priest was going into the lion’s den. Though liberals and many in the labor movement admire him, conservative factions distrust him. And Ireland’s largest political party is home to some of the latter.
In another sense, he was going home. His father — who worked as a truck driver for CIE, the state transport company — was a Fianna Fail member.
Healy, the eldest of eight children, was raised in Blackrock, in Cork City. His mother, who’s 83, and five of his siblings still live in Cork. His father died five years ago in his 90s.
“I don’t recall any great road to Damascus experience,” Healy said of his decision to join the SMA Fathers, which sends missionaries to Africa. Four other altar-servers joined with him, and they’re all still members of the congregation.
In 1970, he went to work in Nigeria and, apart from an 18-month study break, was based there for a dozen years.
There he came to understand the problems of Africa were deeply affected by the Northern hemisphere and it changed his view on social policy. “What the United States was doing, what Europe was doing, had a huge impact on Africa,” he said.
As an SMA Father, he could spend regular three-month vacations studying at home in Ireland. Then he opted to finish his academic work at Fordham University in New York.
On March 16, 1975, he won the Long Island Marathon.
“In the following day’s New York Times the headline was: ‘Irishman wins his own parade,’ ” he remembered, laughing.
Healy’s personal best of 2:15:02, run in Ireland in 1971, was a national record for a few years and is still one of the fastest 20 marathons ever by an Irish athlete. He ran his last in 2000, but now, he said, he only jogs a few times a week.
Resettled in Ireland by 1983, and armed with a doctorate in social policy and social change, Healy was appointed to his current position. Although he shares it with Sr. Brigid Reynolds, and there are several other CORI commissions, he is by far the group’s most public face.
In 1996, CORI was one of one eight organizations that comprised a new pillar of the social partnership.
Since 1987, government, employers, farmers and labor had been signing three-year agreements. “Another part of society was not at the table, but was being affected by the decisions made,” Healy said.
The social partnership agreements are clearly not the solution to the problems CORI highlights, but the benefits have been tangible nonetheless, he said.
CORI, though, doesn’t feel obliged to let up in its criticisms of economic policies that it says are excluding so many people.
But surely poverty is relative, CORI’s critics argue.
The organization doesn’t disagree and it bases it figures on government’s own definition of what poverty is.
Poverty has always been measured in relative terms. Poor people, for instance, are seven times more likely to get certain diseases. And there’s a link between poverty and educational attainment. Eighteen percent of people leave school without qualification — a figure that has remained stubbornly the same in Ireland since 1982.
One journalist commented recently that if incomes have shot up — and poverty is usually measured as a percentage of median income — then it was a truly “astonishing state of affairs” if large numbers of people were still poor. He implied that Healy and CORI were using a statistical “trick.”
Yet it’s hardly news that rapid economic change can impoverish many people and opens up big gaps in income distribution. CORI says that a fifth of the Irish population has barely enough to survive on and no more. If, despite the country’s prosperity, they are denied even minor luxuries, then they are “socially excluded.”
It needn’t be that way, Healy’s organization argues.
Universal plan
Clark first contacted Healy when he spotted an article he had written in the Cork Examiner about the concept of basic income guarantee.
The American had never heard of the idea that is similar to social security for retirees in the United States. It’s broader in scope than social security, however, giving a single payment to every member of society, and then taxing all other sources of income, possibly at a single rate.
But Clark became convinced that it would promote economic competitiveness and published a book about it in 2002, in cooperation with CORI.
“Don’t wait for the movie,” he said.
He was surprised to discover in his research that the Nixon administration floated the idea in the early 1970s, and it won support on the left and as well as the right, which saw the end of the means-tested regulation of the poor. The liberal James Tobin and monetarist guru Milton Friedman, both Nobel Prize-winners, backed versions of the concept, he said.
Ultimately, the greatest opponents of the plan in Congress were white Southern Democrats who felt that, with a guaranteed income, blacks would be less available as cheap seasonal labor.
Clark said: “We went into the detail. We showed how you could transform to that system [without major disruption]. And that it would eliminate material poverty in Ireland.”
The New York academic added that universal programs have always been the most popular and among the most effective. In the United States, he added, social security reduced poverty rates among seniors from half to just 10 percent.
However, Irish critics have labeled the basic income guarantee as “harebrained,” evidence that Healy himself is “mad.”
More generally, if a recent Sunday Business Post profile is any measure, the priest and CORI’s justice commission have no shortage of anonymous enemies, from right-wing Catholics to senior civil servants, willing to offer negative assessments.
Very much on the record, though, is Kevin Myers, the curmudgeonly Irish Times columnist who has targeted Healy for years.
“At the beginning I tried to engage with him,” the priest said of Myers, whom he dubbed a “pub-stool commentator.”
The columnist is just the most extreme example of the general misrepresentation of views he’s become used to.
“I’ve no problem with discussing, arguing and defending a position, putting out alternative views, and being open to change.,” he said. “If somebody has a better analysis, I’ve no problem taking it on board, and acknowledging it. But there’s no point in arguing with people who are not interested in letting the truth prevail.”
This story appeared in the issue of January 12-18, 2005
