I remember interviewing Richard in his home in Westport for academic work I was doing in April 2001. As always he was a gentleman – patient, passionate and precise. He explained exactly why the economic system would shortly crash, why the financial system couldn’t continue in its present mode. In the face of few others recognizing this he laughed his bemused laugh. Yet there was no despair from Richard. He could see what was coming and he wanted to think about how we would respond.

So, like many deep thinkers, Richard was years ahead of his time. While his voice was largely unheard in the centres of decision-making and media in this country, history is already showing how right he was. The only meaningful tribute we can now pay to Richard is to listen to the rest of his ideas and forge together the human ecological society he and many others have thought and dreamed about. I do not doubt that in years to come, from the perspective of another time, Richard Douthwaite will finally be accorded the status and respect his immense achievement deserves.

My deepest sympathy to his family, his many friends and to all who were touched by his presence.

This is the voice of the poor. It is almost never heard. It may not be heard at all during the election campaign. Yet, this is our country too.

This is who we are.

We are one of these:

620,000                 people who live at risk of poverty;

140,000                 who are long-term unemployed;

40,000                   who are Travellers;

15,425                   who were committed to prison in 2009;

5,694                     who are children in care;

5,582                     who are in direct-provision hostels.

5,000                     who are homeless

4,000                     with disabilities who live in outdated institutions

This is our country too.

Let me tell you a bit more about us. You may not know. We live in the land of whys. Perhaps you can answer.

80% of Travellers leave school before completing their 2^nd level education. Why?

In 2009 155 children were admitted into adult psychiatric hospitals, which is regarded as a breach of international human rights. Why?

In the ten years to 2009, 501 unaccompanied asylum-seeking children went missing from state care. Why?

Almost 20% of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people have attempted suicide in Ireland. Why?

Lone-parent families are up to ten times more at risk of poverty than other families. Why?

Men in the poorest parts of our country live on average four years less than those in more affluent areas. Why?

199 children and young adults died in State care or known to social services in the ten years up to 2010. Why?

The Bertelsmann Foundation found that Ireland was the 5^th most socially unjust country in the OECD behind Chile, Mexico, Greece and Turkey. Why?

Ireland has the lowest acceptance rate in the EU for refugee status – 1%. Why?

The OECD has shown that just ⅓ of those with disabilities are employed in Ireland and ¼ live on less than 50% of the national median income. Why?

More than 4,000 people with disabilities are confined to outdated and unsuited institutions of care. Why?

Only 21% of the State’s community mental health teams have their full staff and disciplinary complement. Why?

The safe number of prisoners in Mountjoy is 540. Yet there were over 670 there on many days in 2009. Why?

There is no allocated social worker for 20% of our children in care. Why?

Out of 21,000 reports of child abuse or neglect, no social worker has been allocated to more than 6,500 of them. Why?

In the ten-year period up to 2009 there were 3,183 prosecutions for welfare fraud involving €43 million and 39 prosecutions for tax evasion involving €2.25 billion. Why?

Less than half of the 600 promised primary health care teams have been established. Why?

Life expectancy for Traveller men is 61.7. This was the national average in the 1940s and is 15 years lower than settled men today. Traveller women life expectancy is 70, 11.5 years lower than settled women. Why?

Only 13.8% of Travellers are in mainstream employment. Why?

Suicide rates are seven times higher among Traveller men than settled. Why?

We live on the underside of your society. You don’t really know us. Perhaps you barely see us. But we are here, silent and silenced. It is not an accident that we are here. The top 10% of income earners have 24.48% of all disposable income. We, the bottom 10%, have 2.28%. The bottom half of our society have 25.25% of all disposable income. 25% of families in this country in 2006, when the Celtic tiger was roaring, lived on incomes of less than €20,000. 58% lived on less than €40,000. 5% had incomes of €134,000 on average.

These are all facts. But they are dry figures. They don’t really tell our story. Ours is a story of waiting, of anxiety, of shame, of fear, of anger, of loss. But it is also one of hope. Despite all, we endure, we go on. Despite all, we have a dream of a better world. Our hope is a hope for everyone.

Now you know why. This is the society you have created. We want it to change. That is our call. That is our hope. Will you do it? Will you vote to really change it on February 25^th?

If not, why not?

We need:

HOPE

H – harvest our own food.

Growing co-operatives builds resilience, nourishment, meaningful activity and community participation by all.

O – openness to new ideas and new ways of being in community.

Openness takes us away from the tired and redundant formulas, ideologies and assumptions of the present system. We need to connect to new values and look to new ‘experts’ – ourselves.

P – participation.

Participation means that we meet, talk and agree solutions and new practices. This amounts to a radical re-democratisation process to overcome our present post-democratic paralysis.

E – exchange.

We need to build social bonds and new economic exchanges between us. This would involve community networks such as bulletin boards where services and needs are exchanged. It involves building upon community resources audited locally. It may involve new mechanisms for managing exchanges such as local currencies or trading systems and the development of community investment bonds.

Key generating question              What do we need to ensure a meaningful and resourced life?

Key response                                    What do we have?

Key action                                           Let’s share / exchange our communal resources or even gift them from those with much to those with little.

The key concern in shaping this re-design is to determine clearly what we want our integrated social, economic and political system to do. We are no longer clear about this. This is one of the reasons  why, despite the system being dysfunctional, we seem to be committed to somehow re-booting it again. We are no longer seeing it correctly. Even it could be re-booted, it should not. It is producing harm.

There are surely two key design objectives that we want any system to achieve:

1. Social equality

2. Ecological well-being.

Why are these critical? Because not only are they ethically appealing and appropriate, they are actually in each individual’s self-interest. Social equality produces the best social outcomes across a range of issues and gives rise to the most human and secure societies. Ecological well-being is simply a fundamental pre-requisite for life and happiness.

Our present system is producing antagonisms both within societies, between countries and between humanity and our planet. We need a system that produces harmonies. This is our challenge – to re-design our system to enhance harmony. Achieving harmony – social and ecological – is the political cause for today.

We now need to devote our minds and energies to these new designs. They will include a new, non-commodified economics centred on reciprocal exchange and ecological costings. Think of our traditional meitheal systems and LETS. They will include participative, democratic descion-making at all levels. They will include community-centred ecological planning.

I think this project can begin now. It already has. This is building new culture from the bottom-up. New ideas, new businesses, new exchanges emerging from the old, decaying model. It is in this sense that we might now be at a time of hope. However, to really enhance this momentum we need to make it explicit and visible and make clear that a new model is emerging. It is incremental, tentative, without a blueprint. What it has is an objective and a method.

One of the winners has studied how bottom-up decision-making and organisational structure results in better and more efficient decision. Below is a quotation from the article cited at the link above.

Elinor Ostrom has been honoured for a body of work which closely scrutinises a vast number of case studies of common ownership, from irrigation systems in Nepal to groundwater basins in California. Ostrom’s results show that, while it’s not the best solution in all cases, common ownership can and frequently does work. Often this is down to centuries’ worth of knowledge and experience that have gone into evolving a common ownership system, the subtleties of which external authorities often fail to appreciate. But Ostrom has also identified a set of more abstract rules and procedures which need to be in place to make common ownership work. Some of her more surprising conclusions hold interesting lessons for state-owned or privatised property, too. Ostrom shows, for example, that the users themselves, rather than impartial outsiders, should monitor procedures and dish out punishments where necessary. Decision making processes should be as democratic as possible, allowing every user to take part in building and amending the rules that govern the group. Ostrom also shows that a bottom-up approach to building an organisation, with well-functioning smaller groups coming together to form a larger cooperation, can be more beneficial than the opposite top-down approach.

There are many features in common across all of these institutions. First, they are led by morally weak and incompetant people. Self-interest and vanity have been the predominant values. Second, they have been self-serving and protective rather than orientated around serving the people. Finally, an incredible ethical emptiness characterises them all. Doing the right thing has become exotic and alien in our institutional culture.

This is why we need systemic change. We need new forms of social organisation grounded on solving problems and serving people.  I do not claim to know what these may be but I do know they must be grounded on bottom-up structures in a much more de-centralised and harmonised society.

For now, as I have argued elsewhere, we must create new networks de-linked from the present system. These would be economic, social, political and cultural spaces outside the logic and control of the present economic and political system. They might involve local trading systems, new currencies, acts of self-governance, reclamations of civic space, communal self-reliance. These networks may be based upon face to face contact, as are traditional geographical communities, or they may utilise the possibilities created by the Internet for virtual community and long distance liaison. The point is to bring people together now to create real, existentially viable alternatives and support networks in order to begin the process of constructing a new, sustainable society. No limit, bar human imagination and ingenuity, can be placed on what these networks may be like or upon what their de-linking activities might be.

We need a whole new way of thinking and acting. We need a new system modeled to deliver social and ecological harmony. Such a system would be designed to re-build social connections and networks. We cannot have human beings rendered ‘redundant’. We must have meaningful activity for all.

I think this can only be done from the bottom-up. We need to see emerging, and to actively encourage, new types of social and ecologically committed enterprises. This would be a whole new mobilisation outside the current broken institutional framework. It would also be outside our traditional understanding of ‘politics’ and ‘business’.

Here are some suggestions:

We need to stop being dependent and powerless and start acting. We need new ideas, new models and new enterprises. Let’s do it!

We need to build a culture of engagement. We need to take responsibility for our own communities and figuring out together solutions to our problems. The key driver of new business ideas is to solve life’s little problems. This must involve building community democratic participative forums, either in one’s geographical area or virtually through new social network sites. Let’s think and solve together!

We need new invigorated local economic activity. One example is to develop local currencies, local capital exchanges and local systems of barter. Local currencies can be used to reward social activity, such as work with children, youth, elderly, the environment.

We need to maximise local resource mobilisation, especially in food and energy. These new resources can then be traded. All of this should lead to ecological enhancement and meaningful activity for all. This also creates local resilience (providing a buffer against global economic shocks) and a basic security foundation for all citizens regarding a minimum of basic goods and services.

What we have learned is that the economy must rest on real activity, on the real social world and on the real environment. We can begin with bottom-up solutions to fix the small things. Lots of small solutions leads to one big solution!

Take Ireland’s current economic policy. Our monetary policy is determined entirely by the European Central Bank. Our fiscal policy is determined by the European Commission. Thus, our present budgetary deficit–GDP ratio is just over 12%. The Commission has insisted this be brought down to 3%. They have given us five years to achieve this. It does not matter which political party or coalition of parties is elected. They must all conform to these budgetary constraints. Our choice lies only in the detail of how we do this.

In effect, our independence and autonomy in these matters are gone. We are in a state of dependency. Our votes will make little difference.

We need a democratic renewal. I have suggested below a mechanism for economic, social and political change that is radical but uses no jargon, involves no protest, is positive, smart and empowering and uses tools already available. It centres on bottom-up participative solution seeking. We need to create a new social movement that does not want formal political power. In post-democracy change will not come from politics!

First, we clearly need to mobilise the enormous wealth which remains in our society and bring it within the tax net. Much of this wealth is hidden behind a complex array of tax breaks and tax reduction schemes. These need to be radically reformed and almost all done away with.

Second, we need taxes on embedded wealth such as property, capital gains and financial speculative transactions. We should be pushing for the introduction of a Tobin tax system on transnational financial exchanges.

Third, we need a third taxation band that targets those earning more than €100,000. The rate needs to be quite high given our present circumstances – perhaps 60%.

Finally, we need to re-examine our corporation tax system. This should not be an untouchable. Take Shell’s deal regarding Corrib gas. They will pay 25% tax on net profits. The Dept of Finance estimate that the State thereby will take just under €2 billion in taxes from a well currently valued at almost €12 billion. This is clearly wrong. We need a significant windfall profit tax imposed. Whatever about the justification for this regime in the 1990s, the circumstances have now changed. The economy is in crisis and everything ‘is now different’; there has been an enormous rise in the value of natural gas which is not connected to any investment by the developers; we now know more about how fossil fuel use is causing catastrophic climate change. For these reasons, Shell must pay far more – at least 50% of the gross value should be returned to the State.

The point is that the citizens of this State can not and should not see reductions in their economic condition unless it is fair. This means that everyone in society – the wealthy and the corporations – must pay their proportional share and be seen to do so. This is the only basis by which we can proceed from this crisis to create a new, fair and just Ireland.