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President Michael D Higgins has said that the response to Covid-19 has highlighted the state’s ability to provide quality universal services to citizens fairly.
But he said he also highlighted the wage and job insecurity of some, the vulnerability of tenants and how many workers who provide essential services are “shamefully undervalued and underpaid.”
In a keynote address to an OECD meeting on the theme Facing Planetary Emergencies, President Higgins said that the global economic system is inherently subject to cascading crises and failures.
And he said that new systems approaches and economic thinking are needed to tackle these problems.
The speech was part of an OECD conference that is reflecting on international approaches to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Michael D Higgins also said that the ecological crisis the world is in is currently colliding with economic, social, democratic and cultural crises.
He said that “modifying the edges of existing models” is not enough and that radical new alternatives are now required.
“It is understandable that much of the current economic comment focuses on the cost of the pandemic. But we must also reflect on the systemic weaknesses that it has exposed in the way we organize our society and economy,” he said.
“Our challenge is therefore to harness the lessons of solidarity and ingenuity as Covid-19 confronts the 21st century society and its global economy with a new kind of emergency danger.”
President Higgins said that the global economic system is inherently subject to “cascading crises and failures,” and those failures can worsen the environmental crisis and deepen social and economic inequality, as well as increase geopolitical tensions.
Addressing these issues, he said, requires new systemic approaches, new economic thinking and “a greater focus on resilience, safeguards and a symmetry” between economic, social and ecological measures.
President Higgins said countries must now look beyond growth as a central metric of economic success.
And he said the institutions of politics, economics, technology, religion and higher education are currently failing and must be reinvented.
Read or listen to President Higgins’ keynote address this morning at the @OECD conference on “Facing Planetary Emergencies”, here: https: //t.co/pSG53ioT1n pic.twitter.com/3xHQD2RXyY
– President of Ireland (@PresidentIRL) October 9, 2020
President Higgins said that we now have a democratic crisis due to damaged social cohesion and the erosion of trust.
“It is clear that a direct consequence is the rise of populist parties of various kinds gaining ground in Europe and elsewhere, some of which enter government and promote fear, division, and use public rhetoric that facilitates hatred.” .
He described as depressing the fact that the world is “trapped in a political economy model of booms and busts” and the absence of critical public engagement.
He said this is due to a media structure whose ownership and control is hostile to this and is “obsessed with dredging in the sea of social media.”
He said that the pandemic gives us an opportunity to do better.
“Successful crisis management is no guarantee of lasting reform. Therefore, we must incorporate the hard-won wisdom of this crisis into solid academic, political, and institutional work.
“We may be far from achieving this necessary paradigm shift that represents our best hope for a sustainable and inclusive future on the planet, but we must dare to pursue it and have the courage to continue to play our role as advocates of a paradigm shift,” he said. .
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