Summary
Michelle
‘I have had [a] good life even though I have had a hard life. You know, I don't look back and think oh why me or anything. It's just the hand you are dealt, I guess. One way you can look at it is as being a good hand, you know, and then others, they can say well its [a] bad hand, but it's just life. You have to get on with it and deal with it.’ (Michelle)
Just like Frank and many others in Bridgetown and beyond, Michelle's family have not been spared the effects of the crash and the austerity of recent years. In response to a question about her family history on the estate Michelle tells me unprompted of her father's redundancy during the recession. She describes the intergenerational effects of the crisis on her father after he lost his job with little or no prospect of other work. While Frank tells his own narrative directly, Michelle speaks of her father's redundancy in the second person, as a daughter looking in on her father from the outside as his sense of self and identity received a traumatic shock. She expresses a strong and innate sense of injustice at the fact that someone like her father, who wants to work, will have great difficulty finding any real function in society, given that, like Frank, he is leaning toward the wrong end of the age spectrum in work terms. He too worked in construction, but the only thing on offer to him at this stage is a ‘Back to Work Scheme’ that the government developed and promoted as a response to the crisis. As she describes it, with implicit reference to the class structure:
‘Me father worked hard all his life you know, and they paid their taxes and whatever and then unfortunately was made redundant. Due to the recession like, and then has to claim the dole and is made to go on this programme, because he is a hard- working man like, and that's the thanks they get for all the years and paying their taxes and you know, coming from a low- cost low- class area or whatever they call it. It's unfair like, it's very unfair because they do graft hard.’ (Michelle)
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- Information
- It's Not Where You Live, It's How You LiveClass and Gender Struggles in a Dublin Estate, pp. 36 - 44Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2023