No Dogs, No Blacks, No Irish

It takes a lot to shock and appal me, but shocked and appalled I was when I made a discovery last week. The majority of my friends have cleaners. Now, if my small and very unprofessional research is anything to go by the average reader will currently be wondering why I was surprised by this. It seems that an extraordinary amount of people in present day Ireland have cleaners. Admittedly I do hail form a house where we have yet to purchase a dishwasher but that is more out of a lack of necessity than any other reason.

Does this mean anything though? Is it merely an indication of the nouveau riche society in which we now live? Are cleaners an inevitable aspect of any country whose wealth continues to inexorably rise? Or is it a sign of something darker, a more malevolent undercurrent that is showing itself in the Irish psyche?

People with which I have broached this issue have all expressed serious surprise that it should even be thought twice about. Indeed, the overriding opinion would seem to be, ‘these people need jobs, we need jobs done, so where’s the problem?’. The problem is what this represents.

We have created in this country an underclass of workers that don’t exist in our minds as real people. This underclass constitutes the same positions that the Irish filled in other countries in the past. The days of Irish travelling to foreign shores to do the jobs that no one else would do are remembered as hard days, dark days, days of no Dogs, no Blacks and no Irish. Yet despite these recent and relevant memories we are now creating the same situation in our own country, we have an underling class, and no one seems in the least bit bothered by it, ‘these people need jobs, we need jobs done, so where’s the problem?’.

When I was chatting with a friend recently he mentioned that there had been two Polish men working on his extension at home. They had worked for about ten hours and had been paid €50 for it by their contractor. Everyone made the relevant ‘isn’t that terrible noises’ and then moved swiftly on to the next topic of conversation. Not one person was more than superficially surprised by this. There was no talk of reporting the contractor to any employee equality body or any other manifestation of their concern. Why? Because no one was really concerned at all, no one cared, ‘these people need jobs, we need jobs done, so where’s the problem?’

People seem to have fabricated two different sets of standards by which they measure quality of life. A line of argument I repeatedly came up against was that ‘these people’ are happy, they are earning far more here than they would be in their home countries. This may be true but surely income is not the only issue involved, what about quality of life, job satisfaction, even basic happiness?!

A large proportion of the people working as cleaners and in other menial jobs are qualified to be doing much more highly paid and surely more rewarding jobs. One woman I spoke to who is a teacher has a fully qualified Polish teacher doing her cleaning for her. There is no one that can suggest that this Polish woman is getting the same job satisfaction and resultant quality of life cleaning someone else’s house as she would be if she was teaching.

If the situation was reversed and Irish graduates were only working in menial jobs for poor pay there would be outcry, the government would be called upon to set up committees, boards, discussion groups and any other number of forums in order to ensure individuals had the opportunity to pursue their profession of choice. But because we are dealing with people that look slightly different, talk in a different tongue and with different accents to our own no one is interested.

Ireland is supposed to be one of the great success stories of the European Union, a union that is supposed to have no borders and equal opportunities for citizens across the economic arena. But it is not opportunities for the benefit of all that we see in Ireland it is exploitation for the benefit of a few.

As a nation Ireland is more equipped than many to deal with our new multi-cultural society. We have only moved one generation away from extreme economic hardship yet we seem determined to inflict the same adversities on a whole new group of people. With a small bit of empathy we can avoid a situation that could imitate the one which blew up in the suburbs of Paris last October. It would be disingenuous to say that we are any where near the level of difficulty and unrest that France is in, but what we are seeing is the foundation stone of these problems being laid.

At this stage all we require is an attitude change, to get to the point where people are shocked by a Polish labourer earning €5 an hour for a ten hour day, to get to the point where we find it unacceptable that we have a qualified teacher cleaning the houses of people with the same qualification, to get to the point where we no longer sit back and say, ‘these people need jobs, we need jobs done, so where’s the problem?’