BY FERN LANE

Poverty and social exclusion features of Celtic Tiger

The Social Justice session provided a fascinating range of issues including, amongst others things, poverty, same-sex legal unions, immigration, the media and fathers' rights.

Calling on the Minister for Social Justice and Family affairs to fully implement the forthcoming 26-County action plan against poverty and social exclusion, Seán Crowe TD told delegates that there has never been a better time for tackling poverty and deprivation, but that "there has never been a government with less commitment and political will to solve these problems" than the present one. "We all know the effects of deprivation," he said "and now is the time to act - not in the weeks before the next general election".

Also supporting a motion supporting increased pension rights, he spoke about the looming crisis affecting low-paid workers who cannot afford private pension provision. At the other end of the demographic scale, poverty was causing some 15% of young people to leave school early. Indeed, some one in four adults experiences in Ireland is affected by issues of poverty and social exclusion. "These are statistics which have remained unchanged in the nine years of Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats in government," he said.

"There are huge pockets of poverty, not just in Dublin and other urban centres, but deprivation across the island; the poverty rates in Donegal and the West are double the 26-county average." This was leading, he said, to a form of "social apartheid".

The conference also voted in favour of a motion calling on the 26-County Government to take urgent action to end child poverty. The motion noted that one in seven children in Ireland lives in constant poverty, that 32.6% of one-parent households live in consistent poverty, and that there are around 1,400 homeless children in Ireland.

Rita O'Hare, spoke to a motion calling for a campaign to highlight and address the plight of undocumented Irish people in the US, who she said, work and pay tax but exist in "a legal limbo".

"The urgency of this issue arises from new immigration bills going through Congress," she said. "One of these bills will criminalise undocumented workers and those who employ them. Another, sponsored by Senators McCain and Kennedy, at least holds out the hope of securing time-limited work visas for those caught in this situation." The conference voted in support of the McCain/Kennedy Bill and Rita O'Hare called on all Sinn Féin representatives to take up this issue of undocumented Irish on every available platform including, she suggested, tabling council motions of support in relation to the newly formed US-based Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform.

On the question of immigration, the conference voted in favour of a motion supporting the rights of immigrant workers to come to work in Ireland. In responding to the comments of one delegate that indigenous workers' jobs were at risk from cheap immigrant labour, another reminded the conference that the real issue was to ensure that immigrant workers are not exploited by employers, rather than to exclude them "There should be proper protection for all workers" he said, "so that there is no economic benefit to exploiting migrant workers".