ARCHBISHOP OF Dublin Diarmuid Martin has called for a new poverty strategy to ensure that the poor are not the long-term victims of the recession.
He said Ireland did not have an effective poverty strategy during the boom times and "today we are experiencing the results of our past inadequacies".
Dr Martin said an effective poverty strategy was about "keeping a watchful eye on the future, ensuring in time that the poor do not become the first victims of shocks over which they have no control".
He made the remarks in a homily delivered at a Mass marking the end of a St Vincent de Paul meeting in Dublin on Saturday.
"Ireland needs a poverty strategy especially in times of cut-backs. A poverty strategy is not a luxury that can be put aside when things go wrong, and parked until economic indicators begin to improve in an unknown future," he said.
He said a new poverty strategy must also pay special attention to areas such as health and education so that when the economy improved people would be prepared. "Reducing the opportunity of the poor in times of crisis may well be condemning then to exclusion also in times when things improve."
Earlier, writer and Irish Timescolumnist John Waters told the gathering that we needed to redefine what we meant by words such as values, poverty, materialism and "the most vulnerable".
We divided ourselves into groups such as poor or rich "but this condition of poverty is one which can affect any one of us at any time at any stage in our lives. By and large, the poor are not some fixed entity who start poor and finish poor."
He said we had a tendency to make others feel guilty for not doing more for the most vulnerable.
"And yet there's no clear idea of how we might actually resolve this for ourselves."
Nobody could tell him how much he should give to the poor.
"How much do I need to keep? How much cognisance do I take of my own future, my child's future, the insecurities of the future?" he asked.
Mr Waters said we were constantly talking around the same assumptions and ideologies.
"We need to get to something more fundamental than platitudes. We need to start understanding the nature of the society we live in, the way it works and what's wrong with it. And then we need to find the answer."
He said he did not believe that we could construct a decent society without believing in an after-life, and we could not apply Christian values to a society that refused to talk about Christ.
"It won't work. Christianity is not just about charity in that narrow sense, about threatening or berating your neighbours for their lack of it.
"Christianity is a proposal for a way to live, and I don't know of any better one. But we've lost it because we have a society and a governing apparatus which no longer recognises its value."
