Poverty is at the root of so many evils, yet our Executive parties are doing nothing to address it
Our Executive parties are doing nothing to address the root causes of poverty, child poverty and multiple deprivations. They’re not even attempting to do so. Generational poverty has impacted on the life chances of not only families but entire communities. Northern Ireland has the highest rates of poverty, child poverty, unemployment, multiple deprivations, health inequalities, educational underachievement, food and housing insecurity in Western Europe.
All of these issues have a major impact on the life chances of those caught in the never-ending cycle of systemic failures to tackle poverty and all its manifestations and air of hopelessness. It is absolutely scandalous that a country that is wealthy allows such conditions to exist. The Workers Party has been at the forefront of raising these issues and have made major submissions to the programme for government on the first steps needed to start the process of implementing policies that start to tackle the root causes of poverty caused by years of systemic neglect and indifference to the plight of the working class.
For the Workers Party poverty is inherent to the workings of the capitalist economy, in which competition between business forces employers to pay workers as little as they can get away with. In a grow-or-die ‘free market’ economy, firms constantly need an adequate profit for investment, and this places downward pressure on wages, especially in less skilled jobs. In a situation where workers can be fired with little or no consequences for the employers, workers may fear the consequences of making wage or other demands because they risk losing their jobs and the welfare ‘safety net’ is punitive.
In poorer regions of rich capitalist countries, such as Northern Ireland, unemployment or the availability of only poor jobs forces many people to work in the ‘informal’ economy, which is characterised by intense price and cost competition, and where many firms survive by avoidance of tax and lack of regulation of wages and work conditions. Self-employed workers, who constitute a large part of the NI workforce, may choose the informal sector to avoid tax but consequently have no legal rights or possible state benefits. In Northern Ireland, the absence of a strong workers party and of trade union representation in many poor job sectors and the informal economy result in intense competition for jobs among poor workers, which of course, ultimately benefits employers. This weak bargaining position of low skill workers in poor jobs is made worse by job situations where management directly decides on tasks and the pace of performance. Poor workers have very little control over the intensity and direction of their labour.
Beyond the workplace, the outworkings of this are seen in poor housing, hopelessness, criminal and other illegal activities, addiction, debt, and the everyday chaos that comes with having no money and no prospect of money. What is required is a complete reordering of who owns what, but in the here and now workers need to stand up to those with the power and responsibility to make changes and tell them that they should be ashamed of their failure to address poverty and deprivation.
In Northern Ireland, the Sinn Féin/DUP coalition’s record of non-accomplishments in implementing policies has made a dire situation worse.
What is immediately needed is a proper anti-poverty strategy that is cross cutting across the entire departmental budgets and programmes and has detailed action plans with revenue costs attached to each specific programme and is ring-fenced and protected and evaluated through a process that includes timetables and key performance indicators that are measurable and consistent across each programme. Nothing less will start to mitigate poverty and its related effects.
August 16th 2025