Sir, - Dr Thomas Mitchell's two articles on urban poverty (July 23rd and 24th) evince a degree of serious thought remarkable for its rarity among people of status and power in this society. While Dr Mitchell is to be commended for his obvious concern, his assessment did elide, shall we say, certain aspects of the background to poverty.
Might I suggest with great respect that the Provost of Trinity College would be unlikely to have quite the same perspective as a son of the urban slum and suburban ghetto like myself? The estimable initiatives proposed by Dr Mitchell would undoubtedly have enormous effects, but there are cultural factors - over and above the educational - which could prove a far tougher nut to crack. The virtual apartheid which so flagrantly segregates the poor from the affluent in Dublin, is reinforced by another factor. This is the crucially important, but persistently overlooked role of accent as a bulwark of what is an undeniable class system. This system is ingrained and structural, the inevitable and indeed ordained result of the bourgeois democracy nurtured since the foundation of the State.
Dr Mitchell's reference to "the danger of creating a caste system" may have shocked the unthinking, but in many ways a caste system already exists here, I'm afraid. There is a pathos, for those capable of feeling it, in the kind of encounter between the well-off and the poor one sees in courts of law or hospital consultant rooms. These are usually the only kind of encounters such persons of different class/caste will experience. Caste is alive and well, and the opposition of those with an inveterate interest in preserving it must be an additional factor in Dr. Mitchell's equation. - Yours, etc., John Grundy BA,
Finglas,
Dublin 11
PS: I left school at 14 - got to college at 44.