Irish home-workers with a shop window to the world

A rural economy with no real jobs, is unable to sustain a growing population. The opportunity to work, in jobs created by someone else, isn’t working out too well. The youth go to university and never come back.

Northern Ireland has an additional problem. Whilst most are living a Western lifestyle which the French or Danes would recognise as European, for some there is an extra dimension to poverty. You’ll notice it in the shops where there are different Irish accents. Accents which are so varied, that they identify a village or an area within a town. Why is this still so, when throughout Europe, local variations broadly ceased generations ago? Integration has been on lock-down. People didn’t go to other locations. Sometimes they didn’t go “past that lamp-post” since grandmother’s time and if they did, they would listen not speak. This brings a poverty to what life has to offer. True you can live a life oblivious to the poor, but just keep reminding yourself of those different accents. Dig deeper.

Lack of engagement with life might only be a vestigial problem, but it is still there. We all had, at primary school, a dislike for the kids in the next village. As we grew, our name-calling became less and the ones whom we denigrate, farther away. We changed, because we went to secondary school, then sixth form, then university. We now value people for who they are, not where they are from, but in growing up, we had that transition. Now imagine you’ve lived in one small area, with a sustained dislike for the people across the field. Are the individuals who are drawn towards sectarianism today, primarily just unsocialised?

Previous work, supplied by other people, has gone to China. In a global economy, costs matter or companies go bankrupt, then there would be no jobs anyway. However, as sweat-shop exposes show every year in recent years, the reason it’s cheaper to manufacture overseas, is labour costs. Plus Health & Safety, pensions, environmental concerns, a lack of. Expectation for salaries in a poor economy is less than in the West. We cannot compete, in a global economy. Or can we?

The prospect of working for someone else, isn’t there and with that, the National Minimum Wage isn’t there either. If you work for yourself, it’s try or don’t try. The wage issue is a moot point.

When the labour market went East, we were only competing on labour. We didn’t have affordable hobby-type equipment to enable home working. Modern technology is an enabler, anywhere. The sums can be redone.

Provenance for items from Ireland is great. People pay for what an item means to them. Costs plus profit do not determine price. Memories, thoughts and feelings do. Something that is unique, or at least has been the focus of someone’s attention whilst making it, is worth more than anything mass produced. Made in Ireland, by Irish, is a selling point.

Another selling point is a willingness for Fair Trade. People, customers, are willing to stand up against globalisation, with its current aspects of exploiting and marginalising. Globalisation has not got a social conscience, nor is it sustainable in its current pattern. Whatever an economy looks like, with wide-spread long-term stability and happiness, constant growth and cutting costs is only short-term.

For the foreseeable future, working from home might be the only opportunity. To have a hobby earn pin-money and maybe evolve to a skilled craft, snow-balling with skills and equipment, which are an investment in the future and without which, that future is going to be just the same as in recent decades. If that can produce collaboration where people talk to each other and stop despising the them, so much the better.