Current levels of inequality in Ireland posed a fundamental challenge to the legitimacy of institutions and the morality of the State, President Michael D Higgins has said.
Delivering the keynote address at the President of Ireland’s Ethics Initiative National Seminar in Áras an Uachtaráin on Saturday, he said it was his conviction “that we cannot effectively, or even meaningfully, address poverty in our communities without reflecting on the ethical questions that are posed to all of us and to our institutions, by the unacceptable current levels of inequality.”
Such inequalities could have very serious consequences for our peaceful co-existence, he said.
Homelessness was “just one of the manifestations of this inequality – perhaps the most pressing of all in Ireland today,” he said.
“The ethical dimensions of such a social plight as homelessness are complex; they call for, at both individual and collective level, not just the impulse for charity as an immediate response, but also a recognition of the requirements of social justice in terms of policy design and political choices.
“Indeed the current levels of inequality pose nothing less than a fundamental challenge to the legitimacy of institutions and the morality of the state.”
As president of a society “which has been affected acutely by the recent global financial meltdown, I consider it crucial that we collectively reflect on the structural, and indeed moral and philosophical, questions raised by this most recent crisis in order to ensure that we learn from the experience,” he said.
“At a moment of great loss, when trusted institutions have failed the citizenry, when the fallacies at the heart of established and dominant modes of thinking are exposed, and when values of social responsibility are shown to have been neglected, or even abandoned, on a grand scale, it might be tempting to respond to the question ‘Is it possible to live ethically in the contemporary world?’ with despondency, fatalism, and even cynicism.
“It would be easy, too, to diagnose the cause of our difficulties as being merely rooted in failures of compliance, individual failures or misdeeds which could be named and punished before we continue as before. Indeed it is not enough to say, for example, that the upheavals caused by an unprecedented banking collapse and property bubble can be fixed if the right supervision and regulatory mechanisms are put in place,” he said.
The current crisis had “moral and intellectual ramifications that run very deep. It calls for an interrogation of our vision of what it is to be human, and the conception of human relations that animate us as a society.” he said.
He was “happy to observe that the Irish people’s response to the economic crisis has not been, in my view, one of fatalism or simplistic solutions.”
Irish people had collectively “shown a deep desire to examine the root causes of what has happened and to reconnect what has been sundered in our society and in our public discourse.”
He said that “if we are to construct a stable and prosperous future for our people, based on sound foundations, and avoiding a replay of the errors of our recent past, then we must engage directly with those issues of ethics that have, over time and for many and complex reasons, become marginalised in our economic and fiscal discourse.”
The last great moment of international institution-building, in the period immediately succeeding World War II, was founded on a clear ethical bedrock; in that case the drafting and approval of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Were the international community to succeed in the great tasks it currently faces.... then it must once again ground its work in a strong ethical framework."
