Community, consumerism and credit: the experience of an urban community in North-West Ireland

Abstract

The problems of debt and consumerism are global phenomena. Although credit has become widely available, it is an iniquitous paradox that those most in need (those dependent on low wages or state benefits) pay substantially more for their credit than the better-off. The study focuses on how forces that operate at a global level – consumerism and the international monetary system – impact on small local communities, in this case, a relatively deprived, urban, public housing estate in the City of Derry, Northern Ireland. The community is traditional and cohesive with horizontal bonds of extended kinship-helping networks of reciprocity and interdependence, culturally homogeneous with a strong sense of identity – Catholic, working class and nationalist; and spatially defined – post-conflict segregated and geographically immobile. The community can be characterised as having strong links of shared communitarian values and informal systems of mutual aid, on the one hand, and weak ties into the wider world producing a sense of insularity, isolation and stagnation, on the other. The impact of debt and consumerism in the community was investigated using a series of focus groups held with representatives of key constituencies – women, teenagers, children and older people. Five key themes were generated from a process of categorical analysis of the focus-group data; these themes described the consumerist pressures and reported the financial struggles and resulting threat to well-being. The constituent groups of the local community reported a diverse experience of strain, isolation, powerlessness and guilt. Their experience of consumerism was age-differentiated and their choice of contemporary status markers was made within the cultural context of the local community. These markers included both iconic acquisitions and rituals of ceremonial celebration – First Holy Communion, Halloween, Christmas and St. Patrick's Day – occasions which provided key opportunities for conspicuous consumption. The study was concerned to generate a sense of how local community action might effectively tackle such powerful global forces of consumerism and the multinational credit industry. Such an intervention might include education on financial and media literacy, money management and debt advice services, consciousness-raising anti-consumerist workshops, programmes of personal development and an agenda for political action.