Self-pitying whining from usual suspects
Get over it -- the cuts could have been, and still might get, a whole lot worse, writes Eilis O'Hanlon
THE first warning financial institutions give to potential customers is that the value of their investments can go down as well as up. That the value of their houses can go down as well as up is a painful lesson which Irish mortgage-payers have had to learn too, especially at a time when wages have also been on a downward trajectory. As for the country's tax receipts, nobody knows better than the Minister of Finance that they don't always go up either.
But Social Welfare remains the one thing in public life which, apparently, must never go down. The only way is up, or there's hell to pay from opportunistic politicians, community representatives, and commentators wearing their voice of the people hearts on their sleeves.
Of course, benefit cuts are an easy issue around which to galvanise discontent. The way the most vulnerable are treated is a litmus test for any society, and angry exchanges in the Dail are a sure-fire way of playing compassion one-upmanship with opponents on the other side of the house. Radio stations likewise can always be relied upon to fill an hour's airtime by inviting upset listeners whose social welfare payments have been reduced to call in and tell Brian Lenihan he ought to be ashamed of himself.
It's natural for people to forget previous good fortune and concentrate wholly on where it all went wrong since. Win a tenner and lose a shilling, and it's always the shilling that'll niggle in the back of one's mind.
Speaking on RTE, Brian Lenihan put up a calm, robust defence of his Budget, pointing out repeatedly that the levels of social welfare being paid out were unsustainable in the long term, and that, even after last week's modest four per cent readjustment, they remained generous by international standards. "Our rates are far in excess of the United Kingdom," as he pointed out to Pat Kenny.
But it made little difference to the well-directed campaign of hysteria which got under way almost as soon as the cuts were announced.
It's worth reminding ourselves that Social Welfare recipients are merely being asked to return to the financial position which existed in October 2008, before they were handed an increase which everyone now recognises was unwise.
Those on jobseeker allowances slid back a lot further, and the allegation that young people are being invited to emigrate as a result has an undoubted sting, considering Ireland's history of families being fractured in the search for work. Even so, jobseekers in their early 20s can still avoid the reductions introduced in the Budget by going on training and education courses -- and, frankly, it's hard to see why they'd possibly object to doing that in the middle of a recession.
Those who have lost their jobs since the start of the year would certainly be delighted if the slide in their personal fortunes could be backdated merely to last October.
Same goes for homeowners paying mortgages on properties which are now worth what they were in the early part of the decade, never mind 2008, and who face not only negative equity and repossession but a new property tax
from 2011. There, if Enda Kenny is looking for examples, is a more striking example of "gross unwarranted unfairness".
At least the Irish Left is consistent about its position on spending cuts. What excuse is there for Fine Gael -- self-appointed guardian of fiscal rectitude and budgetary toughness, if its rhetoric is to be believed -- to go playing the same mealy-mouthed tune?
The bottom line is this: the cuts weren't that bad. They could have been a lot worse. They might yet get a lot worse, if conditions don't improve. In the meantime, Social Welfare recipients need to show some character, painful though it is, and get over it. Everybody has taken a hit in this recession, and their hit was demonstrably less vicious than most.
What really rankled was the inner-city residents who guested on Vincent Browne's TV3 show on the night of the Budget having the bare-faced audacity to claim that the worst off in Irish society had not benefited at all from the Celtic Tiger. Eaten bread may be soon forgotten, as the saying goes, but is a 130 per cent increase in Social Welfare payments over the past 12 years, together with a 330 per cent increase in Child Benefit, really not getting a good deal from prosperity? Was the rise to almost full employment not a boon? Who was getting these extra jobs if it wasn't the very people now cynically claiming that they were forgotten?
Suddenly, instead of stepping back and taking the long view, accepting that those who rely on State aid for an income are still ending this decade in hugely better shape than they started it, they hit out at anyone they regard as more fortunate than themselves.
That included Patricia Callan, director of the Small Firms Association (SFA), who was put in the firing line by fellow guests on Browne's show for daring to remind them that it is the business community that creates the wealth which allows this level of benefit to be paid in the first place, and that the only way to bridge the yawning gap between money coming in and going out of the State's coffers is to increase employment again and so reverse the decline in tax receipts.
Patricia Callan has consistently made the maintenance of employment levels the SFA's number one priority. For this, she was crudely lumped in with the bankers and the billionaires by sections of a self-pitying whinging audience who seemed to think that a properly functioning business culture is the disease rather than the cure.
This is the atmosphere which is now being forged in Ireland, whereby hardworking small business people who have taken risks to try and do something for themselves and their families are treated like absentee landlords sponging off the blameless lower classes. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you. It's the middle classes in Ireland who pay the bills. Class envy never wrote a single dole cheque or funded a single operation.
Ultimately, budgets are about figures, so here's the salient one from the new Social Welfare Bill: those on the dole in Ireland are down about e8 a week. It's not ideal, but if this is what Siptu president Jack O'Connor calls "callous and unjust and uncaring", then I'm not sure those words have any meaning any more.
Because if, by the end of this crisis, that is as callous and unjust and uncaring as it gets, then we'll have got off bloody lightly.
Originally published in
