Like all Gaul of yore, the world was once divided into three parts. The wealth dominant first: the self-styled repository of civilisation, social advancement and rational economic management. Then there was the second world filled with harsh, unyielding, authoritarian apparatchiks who ground down their people’s souls while sacrificing their bodies in the name of a perverse and unattainable ideology. And finally the third world: that hopeless, incapable, recalcitrant part of the world that would forever require the heavy hand of its colonial master to guide it through a fog of myth and mayhem.
It was as neat as it never was true. And it still is not true. Poverty, inequality is now a (mal)function of all parts of the world and not just Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America. Almost half of the world’s wealth is now owned by just one percent of the population. The bottom half of the world’s population owns the same as the richest 85 people in the world. Year-on-year global elites are increasing their share of the world's wealth and increasingly that wealth is coalescing around a small number of people. Seven out of ten people live in countries where economic inequality has increased in the last 30 years – Ireland included.
So what if anything can be done? Perhaps start here.
Speaker: Peadar King, Documentary Film Maker and RTE Broadcaster
About the Speaker
For well over a decade Peadar King has produced numerous documentaries on a range of human rights issues. As producer / presenter of the RTÉ What in the World? series, he has to date worked in almost fifty countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America. He is a regular contributor to RTÉ’s Radio 1’s World Report and is the author of What in the World? Political Travels in Africa, Asia and Latin America (The Liffey Press, 2013).