The magazine cover last month asked, in a blazing headline, “Is Charity Dead?” My immediate reaction was, “Ah now! Surely that’s over the top?”

Charity, like the poor, will always be with us. It would appear to be a lesson of human experience. Even as societies become prosperous, the poor do not go away, you know.

What changes is the definition of what it is to be poor. In other words being poor is like modern morality, it is very much a child of context. Though not everyone would agree with such relativity where morality, poverty, or even where what constitutes a child is concerned. Is a foetus a child? (Please, please, let us not go there!)

What is clear is that here in Ireland we have become deeply suspicious of "the charity business". There have been the scandals, of course, but as corrosive have been revelations of the numbers of highly paid executives running so many of our charities, and their duplication in already overcrowded areas such as homelessness, suicide prevention and child care, for example. All funded by the public, whether through taxation or donation.

Business mentality

This business mentality seems to go against the spirit of what most of us consider as charity. There is also the intense competition between each charity for our money, whether from donation or the State.

You will see graphic examples in the run-up to Christmas with expensively run charity campaigns on radio, TV, in newspapers, and on posters near you, crying “gimme, gimme, gimme”. And usually accompanied by images of distressed humanity. The more so the better, for publicity purposes. It can be obscene but there is nothing quite as effective as a crying child to pull at the purse strings.

Particularly at Christmas, with its splurge, and the glorious availability of dollops of accompanying guilt ready as turkey for the plucking. Who, reasonably, could expect any charity executive to ignore the fish-in-a-barrel opportunity this offers to help people be free of such guilt? Give the suckers a break. And they do. Bless them.

Then, when I looked closer at that magazine cover last month, I discovered the headline was about Charity Dingle a character in the TV soap Emmerdale.

Foolish me. When will I ever learn?

Charity from old French charité: "(Christian) charity, mercy, compassion; alms", itself derived from the Latin caritas.

inaword@irishtimes.com