Jim Traue: Look deeper into roots of violence

Irish labourers take a break during work on a reservoir in Yorkshire around 1890. Picture / Getty Images

The circumstances of the Kahui family and other cases of child abuse and killing in Maori families has again led many people to believe we have a Maori problem.

Maori leaders who have spoken out insist a Maori solution is required. John Tamihere has called for Maori agencies to be funded to solve Maori problems. Pita Sharples in speaking about the Kahui case insists that Maori are not brown Pakeha.

Some voices, still in a minority, are asking that we look deeper into the roots of this kind of violence.

A quick look back in history may help our thinking: "These people are three times more likely to be prosecuted than the general population and five times more likely to be imprisoned. They make up nine out of 10 habitual criminals. They are not as good managers as the English; they don't live equally well on equal wages; they don't aspire to the same comforts. They live more for the present moment. Their children are virtually orphans, left to gambol in the streets without parental control. They grow up without any work skills and are untrained to habits of daily work.

"These people are far more prone to the use of violence in fits of intoxication. In their squalor and unreason and drunken violence they constitute a readymade nucleus of degradation and despair. They are inherently idle; people who never did an honest day's work in their lives. Should every taxpayer have to carry one of these families on his shoulders? Generous welfare systems attract the least desirable of them and they become dependent and demoralised and absorbed into a rookery of thieves and beggars. No government, except by very indirect and gradual persuasion, can change a slothful, impoverished and reckless race."

Who were these dreadful people? They were the Irish who went, in increasing numbers, to dig the canals and build the railways and staff the factories during England's industrial revolution in the early 19th century. They were the shock troops in Manchester's textile industry. They flooded into lowly paid occupations and, in the absence of trade unions or a minimum wage, their presence held down industrial wages and boosted profits.

After the great Irish famine of 1846 a flood of destitute and starving Irish poured into England's major cities, exacerbating the existing problems of poverty, overcrowding, drunkenness, disease, and unemployment. They were discriminated against and marginalised in housing and employment and forced into Little Ireland ghettos. "No Irish need apply" appeared regularly in advertisements for jobs and accommodation.

The characterisations of the Irish mirror those of Maori in talkback radio and newspaper columns today. The actual words and phrases, slightly edited, are drawn from Royal Commissions, Parliamentary reports, editorials in The Times and Liverpool newspapers, Henry Mayhew and Thomas Carlyle, between 1820 and 1850.

The social chaos created by laissez faire policies in the early stages of the industrial revolution was quickly translated into the Irish Problem, and when overcrowding and unsanitary conditions in the major cities produced the typhus epidemic of 1847 it became the Irish Fever. In 1898 the press dubbed disorderly gangs of youths "hooligans", disowning the British yobbo by giving him an Irish name.

Liverpool had the highest concentration of poor Irish in Britain, and its social problems and deaths in the typhus epidemic of 1847 were extreme. The British Registrar General, responsible for gathering and publishing statistical information, in an uncharacteristic outburst in November 1847, wrote: "Liverpool, created in haste by commerce - by men too intent on immediate gain - raised without any tender regard for flesh and blood, and flourishing while the working population was rotting in cellars, has been severely taught a lesson that a portion of the population - whether in alleys or on distant shores - cannot suffer without involving the whole community in calamity."

Could it be that what we have is not a Maori problem but a deep-seated structural problem in our society that affects the whole community? Maori don't have a monopoly on poor education, lack of work skills, poverty, heavy drinking and drug abuse, violence, despair, and the neglect and maltreatment of children. Perhaps the injection of a little more "tender regard for flesh and blood" into economic policy, despite colour or culture, might help.

And could it be that rather than Maori solutions, based on the practices and values of an idealised pre-European Maori culture, there are more effective solutions to be found in the British experience? After dabbling with various solutions to the Irish problem, such as deporting them, refusing poor relief and letting them starve, aggressive policing (police parading the streets with cutlasses drawn) or locking up more in prison, Britain soon diagnosed the real problem of a society hell-bent on economic progress despite the heavy price of social dislocation.

Central and local government intervened in education, sanitation, housing, health, and working conditions, regulation of business and industry; trade unions were legalised to organise workers to bargain with their employers. Health insurance, old age insurance, widows' pensions and unemployment insurance raised the health, incomes and hopes of those at the bottom of society. And as the general level rose, the underclass shrank, and "the Irish problem" disappeared from the headlines.

* Jim Traue is a former public servant and chief librarian of the Alexander Turnbull Library.


Reader comments:

My congratulations on your excellent article. It is to be hoped that it will be discussed in senior education centres.
- - - posted 2.21pm July 20, 2006 by Janis Fairburn

Thank you for your thought provoking and interesting analysis on the problem that besets all families and citizens of our lovely country. Your consideration of the Irish 'problem' is a welcome addition to the present debate reinforcing the fact that violence is not color blind. My late cousin John A Lee captured this hidden propensity of violence extremely well in his novel, Children of the Poor.
- - - posted 10.09am July 13, 2006 by Chris Webster