In Defence of the Middle Class

by Robert O'Byrne

My name is Robert and I am a member of the middle class. It’s not something I boast about because, after all, that would be rather like drawing attention to my height or my gender or any other feature over which I have had absolutely no say. My position in the social pecking order was decided for me by circumstances beyond my control, which is why I feel no compunction to brag of it. But nor am I ashamed of being middle class. Again, why should I be ashamed? Yet this indifference to my middle class status makes me unusual, if not unique. Indeed most of my fellow countrymen and women, though they belong to precisely the same socio-economic category as myself, would rather deny this. They cannot accept that Irish society today is overwhelmingly middle class.

Of course, this wasn’t always the case. Traditionally, we Irish prided ourselves on being classless, even if this was less the outcome of a collective decision to minimise social divisiveness than the fact that none of us had any money. In 1986, for example, just over a million people here were in full-time employment, working in jobs that were usually ill-paid (and earning salaries that were heavily taxed). Twenty years later, almost two million people in Ireland are in full-time employment, earning more money and paying less tax.

In the old days, near-uniform poverty allowed us to claim we weren’t like those people across the water with their highly-nuanced social rankings. For centuries in Ireland, there’d been a handful of rich people, most of whom lived in very big houses, and then the rest of us who barely managed to keep roofs over our heads. The only classes we knew were the ones some of us attended at school. We were all working class, even if only a few of us were fortunate enough to have work.

Now we have near-full employment and immigrants desperate to move to Ireland because they know there’s an abundance of well-paid jobs available here. Yet speak to the native Irish and you’re liable to receive the impression that most of us are still either struggling to draw a meagre living from the soil (that’s the 89,277 people registered in last year’s census as working in farming, fishing and forestry) or else slaving in some menial employment that barely pays enough to cover the cost of a mortgage. Never mind that last September Dublin airport registered a 14 per cent increase in traffic on the same month in 2006, thanks to Irish citizens flying hither and thither on their second, third or even fourth annual holiday (and that excludes shopping weekends away to the likes of New York and Paris). Never mind that the moment the bells peal to announce the advent of a new year, large swathes of the populace insist on acquiring a new car. Never mind that property ownership in this country doesn’t just encompass the family home but very often a portfolio of investments both within Ireland and overseas. Despite all of these things, Ireland would rather not accept that circumstances here have changed and the country has become a bastion of the bourgeoisie. Instead, it likes to imagine itself as stubbornly, proudly working class.

The absurdity of this notion was brought home to me of late by a number of circumstances. One of these was listening to a man called Owen McCormack on RTE Radio. Mr McCormack was among the Dublin Bus employees attached to the Harristown depot who recently refused to drive a bus and thereby left around 60,000 commuters stranded for days on end. Justifying his behaviour on Morning Ireland, he spoke in passionate terms about the plight of the working class and suggested his employers were analogous to William Martin Murphy, the tram company boss who led the opposition to James Larkin’s Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union in the 1913 lock-out. This is arrant nonsense, not least because the conditions that pertained almost a century ago no longer exist. Nor does the working class, as Owen McCormack imagines it.

Dublin Bus is currently advertising for drivers whose pay begins at €513 per week (€600 including shift premium) rising to €594 per week (€730 including shift premium). This means that allowing for a shift premium, a Dublin Bus driver can earn close to €38,000 in a year. According to the Central Statistics Office, in 2006 the average annual industrial wage was €32,471.40 for men (and only €23,458.24 for women). State legislation requires that Dublin Bus offers its staff holidays and sick leave as well as such benefits as subscribing to either a company or PRSA pension scheme, a subsidised medical scheme, free bus and concessionary rail travel. You can bet none of those were provided to William Martin Murphy’s hard-pressed, tenement-occupying employees – and yet Owen McCormack would have us believe he and his fellow bus drivers are members of the same working class and are as much oppressed as was ever the case. Whereas, obviously, they are members of Ireland’s ever-burgeoning middle class. 

To some extent, I can sympathise with Mr McCormack’s desire to retain his old status because when it comes to Irish society, a lot has changed in a little time. There’s a great deal of catching-up to do, not least in how we officially define class here. To date, no formal investigation has been conducted on the subject, not by the CSO or the ESRI or by the leading marketing survey companies. As a rule, when it comes to determining status, we’re forced to fall back on the NRS Social Grades. This is a system of demographic classification originally developed by Britain’s National Readership Survey as a method of determining who reads which newspapers and magazines. It has, therefore, always been much beloved by advertisers keen to focus on their target audience. There are six NRS grades, ranging from A, which is considered Upper Middle Class and consists of people employed in higher management and administration as well as senior professionals, to E which is basically everyone at the lowest level of subsistence. Traditionally the key consumers sought both by the media and advertisers were As and Bs, as they were thought to be comfortably middle class with a larger proportion of disposable income than anyone else. But can that really be true in today’s newly-affluent Ireland?

As a sociologist at the Economic and Social Research Institute observed, somebody classified according to the NRS system as C2 (skilled manual, member of the working class) could actually be making more than his supposedly middle class equivalent. Actually today a well-off C2 is, to all intents and purposes, a member of the middle class but just not graded as such by the outmoded system on which we depend for our social designations. Thus the average Irish C2, while not considered middle class by profession, nevertheless meets many of the other criteria required for admission to the bourgeoisie, such as a belief in the importance of property ownership and the espousal of a consumerist lifestyle, along with sufficient income for this to become a reality.

According to the most recent census, in the past 35 years the number of private households in permanent residence within this state has effectively doubled to almost 1.5 million, with 17 per cent of all homes in Ireland built within the last five years. What’s more, there aren’t simply a lot more private home owners in Ireland: they’re also living in much bigger properties. Whereas a little over 42,000 houses had at least seven rooms in 1971, by 2006 that figure had climbed to over 200,000.

Likewise the number of Irish car owners has steadily grown. Of the 1,462,296 households in the state, 1.2 million of them possess at least one car, an increase of 170,000 on four years earlier. And as if further evidence were needed of our passion for private transport: 34,587 Irish households have four cars or more.

Another statistic indicating the expansion of the middle class in Ireland is possession of a university degree or its equivalent. The number of people completing their education with a third-level qualification increased by over 180,000 between 2002 and 2006, from 645,000 to 830,000; this represents an increase of over 28 per cent in four years. At the other end of the scale the number of persons educated to primary level continues to fall.

All this information is in the public domain. But there continues to be a widespread refusal to admit that more and more of us Irish are indubitably middle class. Take, for example, a personal analysis of class in contemporary Ireland recently proposed by Conor McCabe on the website dublinopinion.com. Based on a breakdown of occupations listed in the 2006 census, Mr McCabe managed to find 1,125,650 Irish citizens employed in what he regarded as ‘working class’ occupations. While some of them can certainly be regarded as such, like those who work in rail construction and maintenance workers (all 548 of them), others are open to debate. Mr McCabe would have us believe that the state’s 51,145 nurses and midwives are working class. Given that these two professions expended much time and effort of late informing the Minister for Health, the HSE and the rest of us how fantastically well-educated they are, it’s unlikely they’ll take kindly to being designated working class.

A friend of mine who happens to be the daughter of an earl works as a bookbinder; seemingly she should regard herself as a member of the proletariat. Equally amusing was Mr McCabe’s labelling of all taxi drivers as working class. A few weeks ago I had to take a taxi. Fortunately a radio station was paying the fare because, naturally enough, like everyone else in this country I earn barely enough to survive. (Mr McCabe, incidentally, thinks all writers and journalists are middle class.) Anyway, we hadn’t proceeded very far before the driver began to discuss the various houses he owned across the city and the state of the rental market. By the time we finally parted company, he had pointed out at least half a dozen properties in his possession even while, during another part of our conversation, he had taken the trouble to let me know he was a working-class man. And, when I tried to claim affinity with him, he let me know in no uncertain terms that this could not be the case. Which is perfectly true: I am middle class. The point is that, regardless of his protestations otherwise, so too was the taxi driver and so too is almost everyone else now in gainful employment.

Yes, there still exists a working class in Ireland, even if many of them don’t actually work; witness the obstinately high rates of unemployment in parts of west Dublin and elsewhere around the country. But the traditional features of the working class have largely vanished and are little mourned. The great majority of our factories have closed or are on the brink of doing so, manual labour of the old-fashioned, blue-collar variety is almost non-existent, and few of us are any longer expected to get our hands dirty in order to earn a living (though as a number of middle-class solicitors could testify, it’s still possible to get rather grubby in the course of doing one’s job).

More pertinently, classifying people’s social position on the basis of their occupations is no longer valid. It might have been appropriate in the 19th Century, when the upper class considered anyone involved in trade, no matter how well-educated or well-mannered or well-heeled, as being literally déclassé. But that kind of absurd social categorisation has long since been discredited throughout Europe. Today, class is determined not by the work you do but by precisely the kind of characteristics already mentioned: property and car ownership; third-level educational qualifications; plus an essentially conservative political and social outlook. And on that basis Ireland, cautious and establishmentarian even after a certain and very recent liberalisation of our social mores, is middle class through and through.

That this situation has not yet been broadly accepted here is due, at least in part, to the fact that while there is no stigma in claiming working class status – indeed it’s often brandished like a badge of honour – to be marked as middle class is somehow perceived as a matter of shame. This is the only possible explanation for an extraordinary piece written by John Waters in the Irish Times in September 2007. In the course of an anti-tribunal diatribe and a stout defence of the Fianna Fail party and its leader, Mr Waters chose to attack Irish journalism – from which he makes his own living – as “an exclusively middle class creation,” adding that “generally our media regurgitate middle class prejudice in the form of cliché, hypocrisy and spite.”

This is an instance of either self-loathing or self-denial because, try as he might to claim otherwise, John Waters is a member of the Irish middle class. He may insist that his sensibility is still rural working class or whatever else he fancies, but circumstances such as his profession and area of residence – Mr Waters lives in Dalkey – indicate otherwise. He is middle class and so am I, although to my mind the Irish bourgeoisie produces no more cliché, hypocrisy and spite than any other social group in this country. What it does generate in exceptionally large quantities is discomfiture, as can be seen almost daily within the pages of John Waters’ employer, the Irish Times – a newspaper that constantly flagellates itself for being middle class.

Hence such bizarre items as that found at the bottom of the front page on November 10th: a feature informing readers that according to a pair of charities, some 51 homeless people ranging in age from their mid-20s to their 60s had died in Dublin and Belfast during the past 18 months. Condolences to those concerned, but unless this information is placed within a broader context it serves no purpose other than to make the paper’s middle class readers feel embarrassment over their relative good fortune. Would, for example, the Irish Times devote an equally large section of its front page to stating how many people who lived in their own homes have died in the past 18 months? And would it care to find out how this figure compares to the number of deaths among the homeless? At least then we would be in a position to assess the latter’s mortality rates as a percentage within the overall population. That, however, would not have made as stark a headline, or have allowed readers of the Irish Times to feel there was something vaguely wrong about being middle class and that those who proclaim themselves working class are somehow better, more honest, more true, more grounded than their bourgeois equivalents.

Nobody better exemplifies this bizarre state of affairs than the current Taoiseach. No matter how many stylists and make-up artists are employed (at our expense), Bertie Ahern somehow manages to triumph over their efforts and present himself as the unadulterated working man. His tastes, he would have us know, are simple and plain and he has no truck with a fancy lifestyle. On those rare occasions when he is not toiling away to make our great nation even greater, he likes nothing better than to slope off to his local pub in Drumcondra and have an ordinary pint of beer with his mates. For decades, this has been presented to the electorate as demonstrating Mr Ahern is not one for giving himself false airs and graces.

Thanks to a recent salary hike, our Taoiseach is now among the most highly paid prime ministers in the world: he could easily afford to drink the finest wines but oh no, he still prefers his pint of Bass. Some of you, I suppose, might find this concept endearing but it strikes me as utterly ludicrous. I would be far more impressed if Mr Ahern sought to improve his palate and didn’t try to make a virtue out of his want of taste. How much more admirable if Mr Ahern acknowledged that while beer was pleasant enough once in a while, there are finer drinks available to men who enjoy his substantial income. How splendid if Mr Ahern accepted that his upbringing, though all very well in its way, had left him deficient in some respects and he now planned to rectify this situation. That, at least, was what one of his predecessors did.

During an era when there was very little money in this country, Charles J Haughey saw nothing wrong in the concept of self-improvement, of aspiring to higher standards. So he took the trouble to learn about good wine, about decent clothes, about improving himself. It’s only a pity that his efforts were at the expense of the rest of us. Bertie Ahern, on the other hand, is no more likely to develop a fondness for premier cru wines than Joe Duffy is to stop mangling his vowels. For either to do so would be to suggest they were being disloyal to their working-class roots. For a great many people in this country, disloyalty to one’s origins is an unforgivable misdemeanour.

Some months ago the English writer Alan Bennett published an amusing novella called The Uncommon Reader, the premise of which was that after accidentally coming across a mobile library Queen Elizabeth II develops an insatiable appetite for books; Bennett’s work opens with her keenly questioning the French President at a state banquet for his views on Jean Genet. It’s all very entertaining and inconceivable, and so too is the idea of our Taoiseach – or indeed any of our other elected representatives – admitting to a fondness for good literature. Presumably Mr Ahern reads his daughter’s novels, but has he read Anne Enright’s Booker-winning latest work? And if so, would he be prepared to admit it? Would he confess to a devotion to French baroque music? Would he, one summer, announce his intention to give Kerry a miss and instead join an art tour of Tuscany? No he wouldn’t, because doing any of these things would leave him open to that most dreaded of accusations: he’d forgotten where he came from. In Ireland, forgetting where we came from is considered a heinous crime, even though the majority of us have come from places that merit nothing other than amnesia. There’s always someone who can recall what we were like before we made a bit of money, and how it was far from Chateau Petrus we were raised. All of which is undeniable, but does this mean we ought therefore to avoid drinking decent wine and stick with beer? Well if Mr Ahern and his ilk are to be our role models, then apparently we ought. Though infinitely wealthier than our predecessors, we ought to pretend that all the lately-acquired money – by and large spent in ways no different from our bourgeois peers elsewhere in Europe – hasn’t changed us one jot: we’re still working class and always will be.

In this respect, Bertie Ahern isn’t just our political representative, he also represents the national mindset. That is to say, although utterly and inescapably middle class, he’s not going to admit to the fact. Nor are large sectors of the Irish electorate – and that’s why they keep voting for Mr Ahern: he allows them to continue cherishing the idea that they’re working class and that the money they’ve made and the comfortable bourgeois life they now enjoy hasn’t changed them. (By the way, this phenomenon is not confined to Fianna Fail voters: in the last General Election, the Labour Party received more support from the middle class than from the working class.)

For reasons that mostly seem tied up with inverted snobbery and a determination to believe Ireland remains as unriven as ever with social divisions, it is acceptable to be regarded as working class but not middle class. In effect, large parts of the country are locked into a sort of arrested adolescence, forever postponing the cares and responsibilities of adulthood by refusing to accept it has arrived.

It’s a delusion to believe contemporary Ireland is anything other than middle class. So let’s recognise the truth and stop pretending the proletariat are still the dominant class in Irish society. Were I a member of the working class I would state this with neither pride nor shame. But I’m not working class. My name is Robert and I am a member of the Irish middle class. Anyone care to join me?

Comments

[Donagh]

As this is the interweb 2.0 and all that, I've posted a reply.
http://dublinopinion.com/2008/01/16/in-defence-of-consumerism-the-dubliners-opinion/
Thanks.
Donagh

[Michael]

This is a difficult issue, complicated as it is by varying definitions of class and the relationship of class with income, wealth and status. The EU Income and Living Conditions Survey can begin to shine a little bit of light - which I have discussed at - http://notesonthefront.typepad.com/politicaleconomy/2008/01/post.html#more

Whatever our take on it is, we should keep this issue to the fore as it is a major, if not always well-discussed, issue in politics today.

[Unclesam]

The first paragraph irritated me too much to continue reading.
I assume, Robert, you are a grown man, and therefore your 'middle-class' status has more to do with your occupation than what you were born into. You're not middle class till the day you die just cos your parents were.
It's what we call social mobility.
But why would a snooty southside rag like The Dubliner be concerned with such a notion.

[Unclesam]

"Today, class is determined not by the work you do but by precisely the kind of characteristics already mentioned: property and car ownership; third-level educational qualifications; plus an essentially conservative political and social outlook."

So someone with conservative views is middle class and someone with liberal views is not??!!

Even if I'm wrong about occupation being a measure of social class your opening paragraph is still contradictory. You said you are middle class because you were born into it and then went on to say someone who owns a car and has conservative views is middle class.

Do you have a degree?? How does it feel to have a cocky student try to undermine you?

[Unclesam]

"How splendid if Mr Ahern accepted that his upbringing, though all very well in its way, had left him deficient in some respects and he now planned to rectify this situation"

Snob

[Everybody together]

Waters is a plank, he should stick to composing crap Eurovision blarney.