A British court in Belfast recently ruled that the Stormont Executive Committee is in breach of its legal obligation to adopt an anti-poverty strategy.
The commitment to tackle poverty, along with a host of others, was promised by the great and the good as part of the 2006 “St Andrews Agreement” as well as multiple other failed agreements since.
We were told that these agreements and the commitments within them would be a game changer for ordinary working people – that Stormont was the only viable option to address all of our societal ills. Yet a staggering eighteen years later Stormont has yet to implement an Anti-Poverty strategy.
In those eighteen years the shameful levels of poverty have increased, the living standards of ordinary people have declined and numerous crises have pushed the poorest further into deprivation and forced thousands more to live below the poverty line. Homelessness, addiction, drug related deaths and other poverty related issues have also skyrocketed in those years. This is evident in the statistics showing that homelessness has increased by over 135% in the Six Counties over the last decade. Over the same time period drug related deaths have trebled.
While other parties at Stormont will look to lay the blame on the current DUP Communities Minister, it should be noted that previous Sinn Fein Communities Ministers have also failed to take action on the issue. This again shows that it doesn’t matter what Stormont parties claim to represent, they will never have the working class as their priority and will always side with the capitalist class and British imperial interests.
The recent announcement from the British Government of £1.6 Billion to be spent on missile production at Thales in Belfast is testament to where the loyalty of politicians lies. The decision to fund weapons of war during this poverty crisis is another slap in the face for ordinary working people struggling to make ends meet. The announcement went essentially unchallenged by parties in Stormont that claim to be anti-imperialist.
Stormont has also prioritised additional spending on the recruitment of British police in Ireland, sports development centres and upgrades of facilities in middle class areas as well as numerous other multi-million pound projects. This all while we face the brutal reality that over 316,000 people in the Six County state live in poverty, including nearly one in three children. For those in Stormont it seems that poverty has been normalised and these appalling rates of poverty no longer faze them.
Over the coming weeks and months we will no doubt hear pronouncements from these same politicians on the work that is being done and more empty promises that tackling poverty is a priority. However, the reality, as we all know, is that Stormont is unable and unwilling to implement the real changes needed to tackle poverty. They have proven this time and time again.
It will come as a surprise to no one that this crisis is effectively mirrored in the other failed state in Ireland, in the Twenty-Six counties. Crisis after crisis has only compounded the misery faced by the working class. All the while, the capitalist class have continued to get richer and corporations continue to post what seem like never-ending runs of record breaking profits.
This situation was foreseen by James Connolly as far back as 1897 when he warned of the consequences of establishing a Republic that did not embrace Socialism; “If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organisation of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain”.
128 years later and more than a century after the creation of the British backed “Free State”, his words have been proven to have been as true now as they were when he wrote them.
It is clear to us that the only way we can deal with issues such as poverty in Ireland, is to completely dismantle both failed states, and the capitalist systems that create and perpetuate poverty. They must be replaced with a 32 County Irish Socialist Republic, the same that generations of Republicans have fought and died for, and where the needs and living standards of the working class will be protected and guaranteed.
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