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Eoin Ó Broin is Sinn Féin TD for Dublin Midwest and his party’s housing spokesperson.
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A topic which I am interested in is ageing and demographic shift. Ireland was, until quite recently, the youngest country demographically in Europe. However, as Ireland’s baby boomers, the generation that David McWilliams calls the pope’s children, push onwards towards retirement age Ireland’s relatively youthful demographic profile will change at a rate we might find quite surprising. We don’t have that many older people now but we probably will relatively soon.
Which brings up something quite topical and that is people in these times pandemic times dressing up essentially murderous ageism as merely very logical cost benefit analysis. The argument is very simple, the benefit we get from protecting our grandparents is very small and the cost is, allegedly, very high. For the best example of this argument here’s a statement from US political commentator Ben Shapiro:
[AUDIO] nobody just wants to say the obvious truth which is that we’re all making actuarial deductions about what are the costs in terms of how many human lives… how many, years of life because that is an actual issue in actuarial tables right if somebody who is 81 dies of covid 19 that is not the same thing as somebody who is 30 dying of covid 19. I mean if this were killing children everyone would be in for lockdown forever that’s the reality right if a bunch of five-year-olds were dying with covid 19 and, and people were saying get back to work I’d be like nope I’m not letting my five-year-old die if grandma dies in a nursing home at age 81 that’s tragic and it’s terrible also life expectancy in the united states is 80. so that that is not the same thing
For the uninitiated, Ben Shapiro is also famous for the expression “Facts don’t care about your feelings” which at time of recording he has as his pinned tweet. Similar arguments have been made locally. Probably everyone has seen a tweet or statement trivialising this pandemic for only killing older people and some may recall, for example, the full-page ad shamefully published in the Irish Times which advocated for a more laissez-faire approach to our pandemic response and did so by supplying a list of statements, most of them about the age profile of people who die with COVID. So, here’s the fact about Cost Benefit Analysis; as any health economist will tell you, it’s all about perspective. Now usually, when someone advocates for policies that risk the health of a particular marginalised group, from their point of view they’ll reap the all benefit of that policy but not and none of the cost. This reveals how myopic the perspective being taken on this issue is. I aspire to live to an advanced age and I don’t particularly care for the idea of the next generation at this point taking it upon themselves to make ‘actuarial calculations’ about what to do with grandpa any time the going gets a little tough. Anyway, the whole situation seems to me an exemplary case study of why we should care about other people’s feelings and their perspective on the facts.
