Point missed

Due to a con­di­tion I have had since child­hood, I go to the hos­pi­tal every eight weeks for a spe­cialised treat­ment. I have there­fore built up a re­la­tion­ship with the nurse who ad­min­is­ters the treat­ment, and we ex­change anec­dotes from our lives. On my visit last month, she ex­plained that she was strug­gling to achieve a prac­ti­ca­ble work life bal­ance, given that she was com­bin­ing her full-time job as a nurse with doing a PhD and rais­ing two young chil­dren.

There is a rather of­fen­sive and long­stand­ing cliché that Spaniards like the easy life, to use a eu­phemism, and many is the time I have heard for­eign­ers, par­tic­u­larly those from my coun­try of birth - whether vis­i­tors or those who have set­tled here - re­peat that nugget of wis­dom. When I do hear it, I am al­ways quick to point out that the per­son in ques­tion is not in Spain, but Cat­alo­nia, and that Cata­lans in fact have quite the op­po­site rep­u­ta­tion, one which they quite rightly pride them­selves on. “Oh re­ally?”, peo­ple tend to counter, “so how come the econ­omy is in the state it’s in?” Pre­cisely be­cause Cat­alo­nia is part of Spain, I reply, and de­spite the ma­jor­ity here work­ing so hard, due to the cen­tralised state sys­tem, much of Cat­alo­nia’s wealth from all that hard work and en­ter­prise goes to prop up other parts of Spain. “Don’t you think that’s the only fair way to do things? Re­dis­trib­ute the wealth?” peo­ple throw back at me, be­fore in­evitably men­tion­ing the ex­am­ple of Lon­don and how it dis­trib­utes wealth to the rest of the UK.

But they miss the point. Lon­don is a cap­i­tal city (and a global fi­nan­cial cen­tre), whereas Cat­alo­nia could - and should in many peo­ple’s eyes - be a coun­try in its own right. If it were, then the in­dus­tri­ous­ness of the local pop­u­la­tion, to­gether with their strong en­tre­pre­neur­ial spirit and cre­ativ­ity, would doubt­less make it a pros­per­ous small na­tion (cue var­i­ous protests based on eco­nomic un­cer­tainty re­gard­ing mem­ber­ship of the EU – but why on earth wouldn’t the na­tion of Cat­alo­nia form part of the EU, other than for Spain’s ob­jec­tions?). Cat­alo­nia’s econ­omy is in fact around the same size as Por­tu­gal’s.

You see, the nurse I re­ferred to at the be­gin­ning of this col­umn is no iso­lated case. In my 26 years here (and count­ing), she would be the rule rather than the ex­cep­tion. I come across so many Cata­lans strug­gling to achieve a good work life bal­ance due to com­bin­ing re­spon­si­bil­i­ties as­so­ci­ated with work, study and par­ent­ing, be­fore then see­ing their hard-earned tax euros head off to Madrid to be dis­trib­uted around the penin­su­lar (or end­ing up di­rectly in politi­cians’ pock­ets, an­other all-too-com­mon oc­cur­rence). Since I’ve lived here, the per­cent­age of tax money spent by the cen­tral gov­ern­ment on in­fra­struc­tures in Cat­alo­nia has been woe­fully below the amount due. Al­though this is true of most Span­ish re­gions, Cat­alo­nia is al­ways one of the hard­est hit in this re­spect, an­other as­pect that for­eign­ers are com­pletely ig­no­rant of, even those who live here.

So it’s time some­one told them: we in Cat­alo­nia work and study hard, as we si­mul­ta­ne­ously strive to raise our chil­dren well and bet­ter our­selves ed­u­ca­tion­ally, so it’s ex­as­per­at­ing to see lengthy wait­ing times for health­care and poor in­fra­struc­ture here while costly high-speed rail pro­jects are being im­ple­mented around Spain that often con­nect Madrid with small towns that have lit­tle need of them, to give but one ex­am­ple.