Entitlement culture and the squeezed middle in Ireland

d'Oracle wrote: »

We need new language and probably political theory.
We insist on using language from the French and Industrial revolutions to describe a system that doesn't exist anymore in Ireland.

The working class , lower middle class and a lot of what you might consider to be the upper middle class is just a scale of earnings expectations and debt access. And in Ireland at least, there isn't really an Aristocracy. That's not the same thing as what Marx was talking about in the 19th century.

Absolutely. 100%. It is completely outdated. I don't know if it was ever even appropriate for Ireland - not only because we didn't really go through the industrial revolution or because we were overwhelmingly rural rather than urban where class politics flourishes but also because the vast majority of even wealthy people in Ireland today do not have to go back far at all to find very humble family background (very interestingly Todd & Ruane in Dynamics of the Conflict in Northern Ireland see this latter point as one of the greatest strengths of the nationalists in NI; even with some new wealth they are much more socio-economically similar than the more class-divided old wealth unionists).

Never mind the Hyacinth Bucket types in modern Ireland shopping in M&S and putting on an affected English accent (although revealingly Hyacinth put on a French accent when she wanted to be posh). Bar a few merchants in Cork and other cities (and even a few in Galway during the Penal Laws who became wealthy in the wine trade), we were pretty much all in the gutter due to restrictions on land ownership. Very few Irish Catholics were able to buy Irish land before the final decades of the 19th century (all 4 of my own grandparents , one of whom lived with us growing up, were born in the 1890s so I don't see that as long ago at all).

Additionally, the vast majority of our families benefited enormously from the introduction of free education and healthcare in the 1960s. Free secondary school education (from 1967) in particular was the great game changer in terms of making Irish society more equal and giving chances to whole swathes of society that never had those chances. All economic growth starts with investing in a good education system. Given our history of much greater deprivation, reducing supports for the remaining deprived sections of Irish society, most especially in education, would be an act of suicide by the Irish economy. Brewing up a storm, right there.