UN: Ireland a land of princes, paupers
(Agencies)
Updated: 2004-07-19 09:02

From millionaire-row mansions to heroin-hit welfare projects, Ireland has become one of the most prosperous but unequal societies on Earth, the United Nations suggested this week.

The annual U.N. Human Development Report for the first time placed Ireland among the top 10 developed nations, moving it to the No. 10 spot from No. 12 last year in an annual list based on each country's average incomes, educational levels and life expectancy.

A woman begs with a child on the streets of Dublin, Ireland Thursday July 10, 2003. A United Nations survey suggests that Ireland is ranked among the top ten most attractive nations to live in worldwide, but also has Western Europe's highest percentage of people living below the poverty line. [AP]

But a parallel finding, measuring the level of poverty in the world's 17 most highly developed nations, placed Ireland second from the bottom — just above its primary economic role model, the United States.

"Ireland has a long way to go before it's a place where everybody is respected and has enough to live life with dignity," said the Rev. Sean Healy, who directs the justice commission of the Conference of Religious in Ireland, an association of 12,000 Catholic priests and nuns.

The U.N. Poverty Index, part of the development report released Thursday, has consistently rated Ireland as having the highest percentage of poor people in Western Europe, some 15.3 percent of the country's 3.9 million residents. The United States came in at 15.8 percent. The report was based on 2002 data.

The Irish government, which takes pride in Ireland's Europe-leading rate of economic growth over the past decade, accused the United Nations of relying on outdated statistics and on measuring "relative," rather than "absolute," poverty.

The former defines poverty in relation to the average wage, no matter how high, whereas the latter uses more fixed tests for determining poverty, such as the ability to pay for home heat and to eat a balanced diet.

The Irish Times, Ireland's newspaper of record, rejected the government line in its lead editorial Friday. "It is not good enough to reject these findings by quoting different indices of poverty. ... Ireland is an unequal society in which many remain socially excluded," it said.

Dan McLaughlin, chief economist at the Bank of Ireland, said he agrees with the government's view that real poverty in Ireland today was at a historic low of around 5 percent.

"They say `poverty' when they mean relative incomes, and, of course, the relative gap between the richest and poorest is growing," he said. "But by their logic, in a land where the average wage-earner is a millionaire, then somebody on 500,000 a year would supposedly be poor."

McLaughlin contends that the Celtic Tiger economic boom in place in Ireland since the mid-1990s has improved virtually everybody's opportunities and standards of living. The rapid infusion of employment from multinationals wooed to Ireland by low corporate tax rates has reversed Ireland's traditional emigration and cut unemployment by a third to just 4.3 percent.

He concedes, however, that Ireland's growth statistics can be misleading. A major component of the Irish gross domestic product includes multinationals' profits, which are largely expatriated to other countries. This distorts the per-capita figure for Irish incomes.

Ireland had a gross domestic product per capita of $36,360 per year, which indicates the average annual income, according to the report.

"There's also a big difference between personal incomes, which have soared in Ireland, and national wealth, which still has a lot of catch-up to do," McLaughlin said. "I doubt anybody driving through France or Germany, and observing all their developed infrastructure built up over decades, and then coming to Ireland would conclude that Ireland was the wealthier nation."

For many Irish, the Celtic Tiger has meant having the right to work in their homeland — but in a country where the cost of most things has soared, particularly property. Many first-time buyers now must borrow more than five times their annual salary and seek a loan from their parents to claim a mortgage.

Healy said most of those living under the poverty line in Ireland today were in households led by people who are elderly, disabled, too ill to work or doing volunteer work.

Such households — representing more than 700,000 people — rely on benefits that haven't kept pace with the economy, he said. The average single person's welfare check is $168 weekly, whereas the poverty line is $225 a week.

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