Ireland needs a ‘crusade’ against poverty, archbishop says

The Catholic Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin has called for a "revolutionary campaign" against poverty in Ireland.

“At various stages in my life I have listened to calls for new crusades to address social and cultural issues within Irish society. Today we need a real crusade against poverty and a real revolutionary campaign to fight poverty,” he said.

“Over the last 10 to 15 years a situation has emerged which few would have imagined and in a certain sense few have fully adverted to.

“The extent of homelessness and hunger in today’s Dublin is creating a divided society of which no one can be proud.

“A child who has to grow up without a proper home and who misses out on basic nutrition brings disadvantage with them for the rest of their lives,” he said.

“More and more elderly who have contributed so much to building our prosperous and successful Ireland find themselves facing new insecurity and loneliness in the latter years of their lives,” he said.

There was a “need to provoke broad engagement within society”, he said, adding that “we need a new sense of common purpose and participatory society”.

The archbishop said it was “easy to point fingers and identify failure on the part of policy-makers”, but credit was due “to successive governments and local authorities for the quality of the services that were provided.

“But in the long-run we have to admit that all of us bear some responsibility, at the minimum through turning a blind eye to the seriousness of the new divide in Irish society,” he said.

Ensuring “basic services and human security for all its citizens is the primary responsibility of government”, he said, but “it would be foolish, however, to think that this should be done simply by public bodies”.

What was needed was “a vision of society which is not just State-centred but is community-focused, in which being a citizen does not mean being the recipient of support but . . . also means actively supporting”, he said.

“Care for others requires more than policy and funding: it requires a true sense of community. The fight against poverty and exclusion must involve all of us.”

Photographic exhibition

The archbishop was speaking at the launch of a photographic exhibition marking the 75th anniversary of Crosscare, the social support agency of Dublin's Catholic archdiocese, at St Paul's Church on Arran Quay.

He recalled how in the past year “we witnessed unprecedented pressure on all of Crosscare’s services.

“Decreasing financial support from statutory bodies was accompanied by significant increase in demand for services.

“Crosscare, alongside others, has been called to respond directly to the staggering increase in the numbers of families and children who are now homeless.”

He said the agency “now finds itself providing additional family meals to those who are living in hotels, along with increasing the provision of food support locally through community-based food banks”.

He said that, over the last few Christmases, Crosscare has had to make additional appeals for food for families as stocks at food banks ran low.

The archbishop said he was impressed by the emphasis Crosscare placed on building community, through “humanising lonely or troubled lives by personal contact and support and human warmth”.

He was grateful to the organisation “for the way it challenges my own conscience and the collective conscience of the church about our common responsibility for all our brothers and sisters and especially those who are marginalised and those we might easily opt to forget about”.