Irish Examiner view: What kind of future are we building?

Irish Examiner

11-06-2025

It has long been a cliché to seize upon a particular headline or story as illustrating the seriousness of a society's challenges, the personification of its problems.
However, this week offered us a true indictment of our country.
The Child Poverty Monitor report for 2025 was launched yesterday by the Children's Rights Alliance, and shows that the consistent poverty rate among children is higher than in any other age group. It also found that the rate also rose significantly last year. The term 'significantly' is appropriate.
CEO Tanya Ward said: 'What is deeply concerning is the number of children in consistent poverty, who are living in these conditions perpetually, which rose by a staggering 45,107 in 2024 to 102,977.
'These are children for whom a decent standard of living and aspirations of a better future diminish day by day.'
Notwithstanding the untruths promoted by the far right and other bad actors, Ireland is a wealthy country with huge resources. The fact that over 100,000 Irish children are in consistent poverty should be a matter of profound shame for all of us. It is a betrayal of the principles of any civilised democracy that such a situation can develop.
As Ms Ward pointed out, not only are those children in the grip of poverty now, their chances of a better future are compromised by the conditions and circumstances we have allowed to become a toxic web this country.
The housing and accommodation crisis is clearly one of the dominant strands in that web, which made another announcement yesterday particularly timely.
Housing minister James Browne brought proposals to Cabinet for an overhaul of rent pressure zones, which will now apply across the entire country.
This move is part of an overall Government plan to attract international investment to kickstart the building of apartments.
Facilitating property investment by overseas operators is not a move likely to win favour with many people struggling to find homes, but all options must be considered in a crisis of this scale.
That is no exaggeration when over 100,000 children are in poverty, and when the prospect of intergenerational poverty is very real for many of them.
Trump's vain display of power
Senator Tom Clonan made a telling comparison online yesterday when considering the situation in Los Angeles, where US president Donald Trump has mobilised thousands of National Guard troops.
They have been sent to the city in response to the reaction of locals to a series of crackdowns on and arrests in immigrant communities, which included the arrest of a union leader acting as an observer.
The National Guard presence has now been augmented by the mobilisation of hundreds of US Marines, a rare instance of US army personnel being deployed on home soil.
Nothing says loss of civil control and order quite like sending in the army, no matter the location. As Mr Clonan noted on social media, in a nod to our own recent history, it is 'never a good idea to deploy marines/paratroopers into civilian environment — we learned at considerable cost in Ireland that 'police primacy' is only solution to public disorder'.
Whether Trump is genuinely interested in quelling public disorder or has another agenda altogether is another matter entirely.
The governor of California is Gavin Newsom, one of the (increasingly numerous) potential Democratic Party candidates who may run for president in 2028. Is Trump trying to blacken Newsom's reputation ahead of that campaign or does he have even baser reasons?
We have seen over the decades that military adventures are a tried-and-trusted ploy of US presidents seeking to distract voters from other issues — though such adventures tend to occur abroad rather than at home.
Trump has had a well-publicised spat in recent days with X owner Elon Musk —his billionaire backer and one-time sidekick — with the two exchanging various insults online. Sending armed troops to the second-largest city in the US is the kind of expression of raw power that might be expected of someone fond of expressions of raw power.
That may be Trump's motivation, but for many others it looks like another marker of US decline — with the end of that decline not yet in sight.
Fact or fiction
The death of novelist Frederick Forsyth was announced this week. He was 86.
A successful journalist in the 60s, he was broke when he hit upon an idea for a thriller, writing The Day of the Jackal in 35 days. The book became a runaway success and Forsyth went on to write a series of thrillers including The Odessa File and The Dogs of War — they sold in their millions and many were also made into successful films.
He spent several years living in Wicklow during the 70s, availing of the Irish tax exemption for artists and writers which had been introduced by Charles Haughey.
He would later claim that when he told Haughey of his desire to leave Ireland and return to Britain, he was offered a seat in the Seanad — though it might be as well to file that yarn with his claim to have spied for M16 while working as a journalist.
In later years, he advocated for Brexit and doubted climate change, but was always honest about his motives. 'I am slightly mercenary,' he said once. 'I write for money.'
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