On the margins

Below is the Thinking Anew column in today's Irish Times, which appears on page 15 of the newspaper.


By Michael Commane
In this newspaper at the end of September Lara Marlowe reported on the grim reality of prison life in California. The United States of America has the highest prison population in the world. So far in the current US presidential election there seems to be no discussion on prison issues.

Dare we throw any stones. A quick look at our prison system would not inspire anyone who is seriously interested in rehabilitating people.

Not much, if anything, has changed since the 2009 report on Mountjoy Prison when it was stated that prisoners received appalling treatment. The Report said: “These are core human rights issues, and the State simply cannot continue to tolerate such extreme violation of human rights."

Some days earlier there was a news item, also in The Irish Times, on the war in Syria. The co-founder of Médecins San Frontieres, Dr Jacques Bérès, reported how the Syrian army bombed bakeries, knowing they would kill many people, who were queuing for bread.

Dr Bérès said, that the blood of the Syrian people was on the hands of the western world. Most of these people in those queues were poor.

Besides these two specific realities, every day, every night, one billion people on our planet have not enough food to eat. That’s one in seven of the world’s population. In Ireland we have approximately 437,000 people unemployed. The turmoil and the pain, that means to the families of 15 per cent of the country’s population.

In tomorrow's, Gospel Jesus tells the man who comes to him: “You need to do one thing more. Go and sell what you own and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come follow me.” (Mark 10:21) The man does the usual ‘good things’ but he is simply unable to make that extraordinary act and give his wealth to the poor, to those in great need.

It would seem most churches are not overly interested in speaking out in support of the poorest of the poor. I don’t know when I last heard a church leader criticise and condemn systems that allow and tolerate such inequalities, whereby we live in a world where one in seven has not enough to eat; in a world where our prisons are filled with people who come from the most disadvantaged strata in society; in a world where we treat the environment as if it were our own personal plaything to do with it what we wish.

A central theme that runs right through the New Testament is Jesus’ interest and concern for those who are the poorest in society, those who have been left forgotten on the margins.

So, how do we manage to profess our Christianity while at the same time take it almost as the norm that so many people around the world experience extraordinary hardship, that so many people in our own Irish society have so little? And that, side by side with people, corporations, orgnisations that are obscenely wealthy?

It might well be the ideal to do as Jesus suggested to the rich man but surely we have all been asked, at the very least, to have sympathy and understanding for those who are poor and on the margins. It’s the theme of tomorrow's Gospel. It’s the leitmotif of the New Testament.

We believe every human being is made in the image and likeness of God. It’s our privilege, our responsibility to play our role in seeing to it that that is a living reality for all seven billion people on this planet.
And we can start the work in the smallest detail, whether that means checking that the clothes we buy have not been made in sweatshops, which employ child labour or seeing to it that the least ‘important’ people in our own villages, towns and cities are given the chance to flourish and prosper and reach their God-given potential. Surely that approach makes far more sense than building more prisons.

The Christian can never take it as a given or the norm, or accept it as 'common practice' that one single person be treated as anything other than unique and special, a gift of God.

We have become accustomed to hear, “It’s the economy, stupid”, but maybe we should say, “It’s the Gospel....”