personal finance

‘Being poor is not inevitable or due to personal flaws. I know, I’ve been there’ | Mary O’Hara


When I was a kid I loved to dance. Anywhere. I danced in the street, on my way to school, in the local shop and at the back of the smoke-filled bingo hall where I tagged along every Thursday night with a neighbour.

I was seven or eight when I asked my mum and dad if I could go to dance lessons. Someday, maybe, they told me. There just wasn’t the money for luxuries like that. I couldn’t let it go, so when I heard disco-dancing classes had started for 10p every Tuesday night at the church hall, there was no stopping me. It was exactly the amount I got in pocket money on a Friday when my dad came home from working on the building site. Each week until my early teens I walked the mile to the church hall where I handed it over and danced my heart out for 90 minutes.

Peggy said I was good, that I should enter the regional disco-dancing championships. I ran home to tell my mum, who was peeling a bag of potatoes in the living room as she watched the TV, with a baby and a toddler. My other siblings were out in the street playing.

“Sorry, love,” Mum said, “we just can’t afford it.” “It’s only 50p to enter,” I countered, but she said nothing and looked back with sad eyes.

A week later I won £1.50 at the bingo. I gave my parents a pound and kept the rest. That Saturday I put on my best red blouse under the denim dungarees I practically lived in but which were an inch too short, and laced up my one pair of decent shoes after polishing the toes and began the three-mile walk in the rain to the other end of the city. I’d never been to that side of town with its big houses and manicured gardens. It was like another world.

The convention centre was vast. Groups of girls began piling in, giggling and sparkling in the most incredible outfits I had ever laid eyes on. A posse of mothers followed the girls, all carrying little pink-coloured cases.

I approached the long table at the front of the room, my hair still wet from the rain, where I handed over my 50p entrance fee and a middle-aged man gave me a white, square piece of paper with the number 11 on it.

Girls, clucking loudly and preening, raced to the floor and took up spaces. One by one they edged me towards the back. Mothers stared at me from the sidelines.

That was the first time I felt the sting of other people’s pity and when I realised, on a visceral level, that being from a poor background came (though I certainly hadn’t heard of the concept yet) with a stigma attached to it. Being poor or “on welfare” was a source of shame.

Other incidents followed. Like realising our first home, where I lived until the age of seven, was nothing short of a slum: eight of us slept in two tiny, damp bedrooms. The house was overrun with rats; there was no bathroom, indoor toilet or central heating; and the kitchen was a makeshift scullery with a plastic corrugated roof. Having a fridge or washing machine was unimaginable. My mum kept it immaculately clean and looking as nice as possible, but there’s only so much makeup you can put on a pig.

Later my dad became unemployed and had to claim the “dole” for long periods of time. Even within a community where many people were in the same situation, this was a source of humiliation: relying on state assistance to get by was seen by some as a sign of parental failure. While we had enough food to mostly meet our daily needs (we had to borrow from neighbours when things got really tight), occasional treats were often paid for by going into debt with loan sharks. Although we were far from unusual – west Belfast, which was also one of the main flashpoints during Northern Ireland’s sectarian conflict in the 1970s and 1980s, was among the most deprived areas in the whole of western Europe – I hated how much we had to struggle and how much shame there was in not being able to afford what others could.

Like most poorer families – and this is true today – we lived our lives in the poorer parts of town. We didn’t have middle-class friends. But, when I first began to understand that we were looked down upon or pitied by many more financially fortunate people, the undercurrent of shame stayed with me for a long time.

Anyone who has grown up poor will have similar stories to tell: those small or large experiences or encounters that force you to register that your family is not just lacking in material things (as hard as that may be), but that as a kid you are set apart from other children. If you have never lived on the breadline, it’s probably difficult to grasp, for example, that for many people, no matter how hard they work at their minimum-wage precarious job/s, they just never have enough to make the rent, eat nutritious food every day, or buy a much-needed new pair of shoes for their kids, or a warm winter coat. You might not have thought about what it feels like to have no choice but to swallow your pride and go to a food bank to stock up on essentials because you don’t qualify for state assistance – or what you do qualify for falls far short of what you actually need to survive and help you get back on your feet. Yet, every single day, people all over the US and the UK live with the gross injustice that is being poor and with the humiliation of being blamed for circumstances beyond their control. It doesn’t have to be this way. It really doesn’t. Being poor is not inevitable or due to personal flaws.

Food bank



‘You might not have thought about what it feels like to have no choice but to swallow your pride and go to a food bank to stock up on essentials because you don’t qualify for state assistance.’ Photograph: Jonathan Brady/PA

From a distance, my story could be construed as someone who “pulled themselves up by their bootstraps” and escaped poverty. I didn’t. I was a beneficiary of the welfare state. It might not have been perfect, but it was a safety net. I had access to good council housing from the age of seven, and to free healthcare and free school meals. And I had teachers who passionately advocated for the rights of children growing up in poverty and encouraged us to believe in ourselves and to challenge anyone or any system that tried to tell us we were undeserving.

I have learned a great deal about the structural causes and consequences of poverty and inequality while researching and writing The Shame Game. Project Twist-It is a platform I created for people with experiences of poverty to share their stories, and for advocacy groups to highlight their work fighting poverty. There are too many to name here but they include people working with organisations such as ATD Fourth World in the US and UK and Poverty2Solutions in the UK, formerly homeless female campaigners in the US and army veterans, food-bank volunteers, and artists, writers and musicians.

What we have to say matters. We can make a difference. I have come to understand how we might build a new narrative that helps address the structural causes of poverty and steers us towards a greater consensus on how we can tackle the inequality that holds us back. As one of the many contributors to Project Twist-It, teacher and artist Janet Owen Driggs, put it: ‘“We need to identify the narratives that underpin structural inequality and consider how they keep us swirling, applauding and, too often, drowning. And we need to tell each other about possible futures.”

Extreme poverty and inequality in America and Britain are the result of a political choice that is causing millions to suffer – but neither is inevitable and they are fixable. Bad narratives underpin and enable bad policy. We saw that all too clearly when austerity was rolled out across the UK after the financial crisis. So, we need to construct a new narrative; one that reflects the reality of people’s lives, not an imagined one-dimensional “scrounger” or “skiver”. And we need a narrative that starts from the premise that all of us have the right to live with dignity and without impoverishment. The dominant poverty narrative, as the US scholar Chuck Collins so succinctly puts it – that we are where we economically deserve to be – has deep roots.

From politics to the media and the wider culture, it is entrenched and it will be no easy task to overcome. However, I have observed a growing impetus for change. An important way to begin to dent the narrative is by elevating the voices and stories of those of us with experience. As one of the figureheads of the Poor People’s Campaign in the US, the Rev Dr William Barber II told me: “We have to shift the narrative. But you can’t do this without shifting the narrators.”

This is an edited extract from The Shame Game by Mary O’Hara (Policy Press, £12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 020 3176 3837



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