Charities give social care and friendship that bureaucracies cannot

• Published date: 19 December 2020
• Author: Breda O'Brien
• Date: 19 December 2020
• Publication title: Irish Times (Dublin, Ireland)

This seems odd because the World Giving Index in a 10-year analysis ranks Ireland fifth internationally and the highest- ever scoring European country. The World Giving index, however, does not just include charitable giving but also helping a stranger, and volunteering.

The Benefacts research covers up to only 2015 but may cause further anxieties for charities given the stresses COVID-19 has brought.

For example, the Wheel which, with 1,850 members, is Ireland's largest national association of community and voluntary organisations, charities and social enterprises, reports an expected shortfall of €400 million in the sector's funding by the year's end.

According to Benefacts, the average value of weekly household donations was only €3.75 in 2015. Lower-income people gave significantly more of their disposable income but older people were also more likely to give (which may reflect giving at religious services).

One school of thought says that giving to charity is just a band-aid and that without radical societal change, throwing a few bob into a collection box is more about salving people's consciences than it is about meaningful change.

Republican-leaning Americans tend to take the opposite view, saying that only charity is meaningful and that relying on the State to administer social justice is deeply suspect.

The relationship between charity and social justice is more complex than either position, I suspect. The word charity came from the beautiful Latin word, caritas, meaning love. It was often used in the fourth-century Latin translation of the Bible to translate the Greek word, agape, which means universal, unconditional and self-sacrificing love.

Unpleasant connotations

It was not until the 18th century that charity became associated with giving to poor people. It began to develop all sorts of unpleasant connotations, such as dividing people into the deserving and undeserving poor, and patronising and infantilising even the so-called deserving poor.

Oscar Wilde was no fan. In The Soul of Man Under Socialism, he loftily declares that "charity degrades and demoralises". He compares those who try to do good through charity to the worst type of slave-owners, the ones who were kind to their slaves and, therefore, delayed the dismantling of the slave-owning system.

Is charity really only useful for perpetuating unjust systems? The Society of St Vincent de Paul (SVP) is an interesting case study. Right from its origins in the 1830s in the wake of a...