Poverty in the midst of plenty

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by Olwen Purdue

Last week Justin Welby, Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, called on the British government to confront the “simple but devastating fact that hunger stalks this country”. The context for his words was the launch of a new report into the phenomenon of dependency on food banks among families across the UK. So rapidly is this form of poverty growing that there are few in our society today that have not come across it in some form or another. I am currently involved in setting up a food bank in my local town of Ballyclare in Co. Antrim and in the process have become aware of similar schemes that have apparently been running for some time now in neighbouring areas such as Antrim, Newtownabbey, Larne – seemingly prosperous towns, yet towns in which many are living with the daily reality of not being able to feed themselves or their families. In Belfast, organisations such as Storehouse and the Trussell Trust are involved in providing emergency provision for hundreds of families across the city. Belfast Storehouse, alone, has provided for over 5,000 families since it was first established in 2008. These are families who have to make very tough decisions on a daily basis, decisions about whether to pay for kids’ school meals or use the money to heat the house for a while. Food banks provide a buffer when the options run out, a means of feeding the family, even for a brief period, at those times when there is simply no means of buying food.

Food BankLooking back to the poverty that existed in Belfast a hundred years ago we have to ask if anything has really changed? Belfast in the opening years of the twentieth century was a prosperous city, its economic success and civic pride manifest in its newly-constructed wide streets, the luxurious department stores that were springing up across the city centre and, of course, the grandiose City Hall that was in the process of being constructed in Donegall Square. Yet behind the façade of wealth and success lay the hard reality of severe poverty for a significant proportion of the population. Yes, there was no shortage of employment in the huge linen mills, in the city’s two shipyards, or in one of the many other manufacturing firms in the city; but what happened if you were unable to work whether through age, infirmity, pregnancy or many other reasons? In ‘nineteen-teens’ Belfast, the answer was very often the workhouse. In those pre-Welfare State days, statutory welfare was the responsibility of the Irish Poor Law, paid for by local rates and managed by the elected Poor Law Guardians. For many, the workhouse, hated and shameful as it might have been, was the stop-gap that prevented many from literally starving. When all other options dried up, difficult choices had to be made and for many there really was no choice but to seek refuge within the workhouse walls.

The economic success of early twentieth-century Belfast evaporated in the wake of the First World War as the industrial economy on which it was based collapsed. As the world slid into economic crisis following the end of war, Belfast found itself facing a welfare crisis such as it likely hadn’t seen since the Great Potato Famine (1845-50) almost a century earlier. Male unemployment, in particular, soared, and families that once had secure incomes now founds themselves facing the reality of hunger, even starvation. Public Works schemes were established to provide manual labour that would generate a basic income for many across the city, but these were totally inadequate to meet the needs of the people. So what options did they have? Unlike other parts of Ireland or the United Kingdom, by the 1930s the poor law remained on the statute books in Northern Ireland as the principal form of welfare available; and in Belfast, where poor law guardians remained wedded to the idea of indoor relief, that still meant admission to the workhouse. On 1 January 1932, 85 people turned up at Belfast workhouse seeking to be admitted. Of these, the majority were young single men, men who during better times would have been employed building ships in shipyards that had now all but disappeared. By the 1930s, the idea of a workhouse to feed and shelter the hungry and destitute surely must have seemed like a throw-back to the darker aspects of the Victorian age. But in Belfast it represented for many the difference between starving and surviving.

Today we might feel able to look back and congratulate ourselves on the progress we have made since then with the introduction of a welfare state designed to erase the shame of ‘pauperism’ and the construction of a non-pauperising system of safeguards for those that find themselves unable to fend for themselves. But can we, really? Have we really come on that far if in our society today we are surrounded by poverty, by homelessness and by real hunger? Has anything changed? The causes of food poverty certainly do seem to have changed. In late nineteenth and very early twentieth-century Belfast food poverty was often brought about by a person’s inability to work through old age, sickness or life-cycle events. By the 1930s, certain safeguards had been introduced to prevent some of this type of poverty, but by then the big problem was unemployment. Today the causes of food poverty are different again. There are many more safeguards in place for a much larger proportion of the population but statistics seem to suggest that there are serious flaws in those safeguards, leaving many to fall between the cracks. Administrative hold-ups in welfare payments leave some families with no income at all for periods of days, weeks, maybe even months. Research recently conducted by a working-group on food poverty has shown that almost half of those who have to resort to food banks are driven to do so because of problems in accessing welfare. The other major problem that seems to face people in our society today is the problem of in-work poverty: where people are working but still not making enough to cover the cost of basic subsistence. People who work very hard to earn a minimum wage still have to face the shame of asking for food to feed themselves and their families.

Robert McElborough, writing his memoirs of life in Belfast in the opening years of the twentieth century, writes ‘My experience of living in rooms with nothing to eat only what friends gave us is engraved on my memory’. That is still the experience of people living in our city a hundred year later. The form of stop-gap relief that people are forced to turn to may have changed but in twenty-first century Belfast, absence of food is still a harsh reality for many.

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