Can we talk?

Known for her no-holds-barred, controversial and satirical persona Joan Rivers, was one of those comedians who could extract a good hardy belly laugh and not just a slight expression of amusement. Whilst the principal target of her off-the-cuff routines was herself, her roasting of celebrities and the dressing down of politicians would occasionally give rise to the odd mumble of discontent and seething review. Never the less she would insist “I succeeded by saying what everyone else is thinking”.

It’s risky, I know, but like my late influence said “I’m in nobody’s circle, I’ve always been an outsider” so to hell with it! I’m pulling a Joan... Can We Talk?

A cursory glance at Centenary content on social media thus far would have you believe that the United Kingdom is a pauper’s paradise. The pro-union defence that arises is akin to a real estate brochure that lists the amenities and features of a property but omits the dry rot and rising damp. The pro-unity response only wants to talk about the rot. The latter not mentioning the similarly growing and embedded forms of poverty south of the border.

Who are we kidding here? The tenants, of both societies, know their societies better than anyone, they have enjoyed both states pros and are all too familiar with its cons.

Unacceptable social exclusion, high levels of deprivation underpinned by an archaic and divisive education system, an ever growing budget deficit, escalating health waiting lists and a depleted social housing market. These are features of both that the zealots of either constitutional position extol without looking into their own backyard.

I am pro-union but I do not insult intelligence. I like many am aware that we have a health service free at the point of use and a welfare system intended to protect and support the most vulnerable. But I am also aware that, the health service is starved of investment, burdened with an increase in demand and a standard of care that is increasingly compromised. Those cast adrift live within a system and a culture that denigrates and stigmatises welfare applicants as idle, feckless and undeserving. The detestable politics of a hand out rather than a hand up. A welfare system drowning in bureaucracy that taunts applicants with a tediously long process, that sometimes takes so long that some die waiting for the services and support that they are entitled to. A system in the UK with the cruellest of sanctions and the lowest pension rates in Europe. Will someone who is pro-unity say the same thing as I have above about the Republic?  Hello?! We both have the Tories or the southern version to the left of us?

I am exhausted with the physiological coercion and perpetual, petty cycle of constitutional dominance over socioeconomic change. We deserve better. The generation, and those thereafter, born into a toxic tug of war, plagued by polluted politics and plugged with biased narratives, deserve better.

As we enter a new year, a new century perhaps now is the ideal time to put down our pens, back away from the blood and thunder drums of division and engage in a conversation about how we, Protestant, Catholic, British, Irish and other, can make this a better society. Those who are ferociously pro-union or for Irish unity offer us little as they either put the blame for poverty and social marginalisation on Northern Ireland’s place in the UK or a refusal to engage in the realities of a flailing welfare system. They care not for the people. They care not that in both places we see growth in the working poor, zero-hour contracts and child poverty.

Nation and electioneering before need. Never the politics of mutual cause that reacts to social exclusion as a here and now issue. Or a call to make this place work. As I say – Can we Talk?