The recent budgetary cut in jobseeker’s allowance to as low as €100 is the most socially unjust event that has ever happened in Ireland. No individual in Ireland could live decently on that paltry sum.
The youth of Ireland have no power and no voice. It is clear that in Ireland and in the EU, social justice is being dumped in order to get economies up and running.
Patrick Confrey
Rathfarnham, Dublin 14
Addressing the causes of ‘mass migration’
After reading your recent editorial on mass migration (Let’s address the causes of migration, 15–31 Octiober 2013), I have been scratching my head thinking of how a lasting solution to the conflict in countries like Somalia and Eritrea might be found, and who might craft it.
I use ‘mass migration’ in my rejoinder because migration itself is natural and common where it is not en masse or triggered by a crisis. The migration we see here is triggered by social disintegration of a political nature. Indeed, it is the political crisis that makes the economy desperate.
So the big question is, how does anyone outside that polity find a lasting solution? The most the world can do is to agree on a basis for negotiation and facilitate the protagonists’ in managing whatever framework is adopted. No other form of intervention or mediation will yield a ‘lasting solution’. Here, I would say the proximate responsibility falls on the African Union.
On the issue of direct investment: this, again, cannot be delivered by any government in the era of global competitiveness. Investors would usually go to where their investment is secure and profits guaranteed.
Just as no country would advise its entrepreneurs to invest in an unstable economy, investors themselves will only locate their business where security and profits are guaranteed.
This brings us back full circle to the roadmaps towards a lasting solution to mass migration, which seem to rest in the hands of those at the centre of it all. Of course, we can always trace the origins to the colonial legacy, but isn’t that now a permanent feature of the historical context.
I think the role of international regional bodies such as the UN and EU is to support the Africa Union in building the capacity to deal with what is essentially an African dilemma.
Son Gyoh
Galway
