Knackers and Ireland’s ‘Bolsa Família’

A piece posted on Uma Pera about how the violence in Dublin affects the local Brazilian community

I’m going to rush things once again. This subject was supposed to be explored in the future, but the Brazilians’ interest in Dublin’s violence problems has increased thanks to an UOL’s report on the matter, so I decided to do a little research about the most feared character for exchange students: the knacker.

There is much noise about knackers inside the Brazilian community and many people tend to see the government aid programs as guilty for the creation and maintenance of this society’s layer, but that’s not exactly the case.

Some history

The first register of use of the word knacker appeared in the 1800’s. It was used to identify a person whose profession was to “retire” animals that could not work anymore. After killing them, this person transformed the animals into products. For instance, the horse’s meat could be used to feed other animals; bones became fertilizer; its leather would end up as glue.

There is a passage in George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” which shows the appearance of a knacker in his original function. It’s only possible to perceive this if you read the book in English, but the above image is a good tip if you are curious.

It wasn’t a pleasant job and that’s why the people behind it used to live at the society’s margins. This might have contributed to the transformation of the word into something so negative as it is nowadays. Nevertheless, it can also be used as a sort of a slang, as “knackered” means “tired”.

In Ireland

Nowadays the word has basically two meanings, both pejoratives. One of them is more common outside the urban centres and it is used to define the Pavee, an Ireland’s originated nomad ethnic group that even has its own language, the Shelta. They are also called gypsies or “Irish Travellers” and can be found in the United Stated and Great Britain, always with some Irish descent.

The second meaning is the one that scares so much the people living in Dublin. Knacker, in the capital, is sort of a nickname given to some people in the society’s lowest scale. They have their own snoot, usually wear similar clothes (grey or blue jumpers and runners) and talk in such a particular way that it seems to be a modified version of the local English.

The violent ones

Here is where the confusion begins. A considerable part of the poor in Dublin are drug users and some of them — along with a non-user portion — practice petty crimes on the streets of the city centre. These are the people who cause panic on Brazilians, but they also bother exchange students of other nationalities, immigrants and, of course, Irish people.

As it happens with crack in Brazil, here it is the heroin that makes success amongst the poor, once it has low price and a strong and fast effect. And, just like in Brazil, it is easy to identify these users, once they wander constantly numb, almost as if they were zombies.

I spoke with a local academic about it and he explained to me that heroin broke out in Ireland in the 1980’s decade, when the population struggled in crisis. He also told me that Ireland once happened to have the cheapest heroin in Europe, something that may have helped to build the current scenario, with statistics showing this as one of the biggest countries in number of users in the continent. Dealing with heroin addiction is as complicated as dealing with crack, and Ireland has been proving to be systematically ineffective to address the problem (see more here).

The ‘Bolsa Família’

As generally people who consume this kind of drug belong to the most miserable society’s layer, a considerable part of them are contemplated by financial aid government programs. They receive about 200 Euro per week that some, obviously, also use to buy drugs, but this does not mean that the system is bad. “All systems are corruptible”, stated the academic (whose name I omit because the conversation was not a proper interview).

Ireland’s ‘Bolsa Família’ was implemented by the government after the Britain domain, when the majority of the population was broken. It was the way they found to deal rapidly with what appeared to be a situation of epidemic poverty, and it has worked since then — so much that Ireland has become one of the best-developed countries in the world.

Nowadays there are still too many people depending on this allowance to survive and this might get worse — in part due to the increase of exchange students in the island. To get an idea, more than 3,000 adults got into the emergency accommodation service in Dublin between April and June last year. It is the biggest figure in history. Many of them need this because, while the amount of money given as housing assistance remains unchanged since 2013, the real state business increased the rents through the city in 20,3% at the same period, meaning that many people became poorer in two years.

And what happened over the last two years? A considerable increase in a number of other nationalities’ students in Ireland. Those looking for an accommodation know what I am talking about: there are people paying a monthly rent of 300 Euro to share a room with a bunch of others.

In every country in the world financial crises tend to throw the most affected people against foreigners and here it is not different. In a moment of fury, one facing starvation (most probably when under drug effects) might not differentiate the “immigrant who is here to steal jobs” from the exchange students, nor is capable of reasoning that both of them are, in fact, producing wealth to the country.