If you are not reading this from A&E and have managed to survive the enduring cold snap without breaking a limb, give yourself a pat on the back. Now, as for surviving the budget - well that may prove a little more difficult. Indeed, some among us may well be wishing that we were tucked up in a hospital bed having our wounds tended to and our meals served up. That way we would not have to worry about cutting corners or going hungry for a few days at least.
Apart from the predictable cuts, taxes, and newly created ‘universal payment’ announced in Budget 2011, what this latest recession milestone really served to highlight this week is just how dependent so many are on hand-outs. Leaving aside the various slaps in the face applied to workers, business people, employers, and negative equity home-owners still trying to pay back mortgages on houses now worth less than half the value, the greatest chorus of objections came from those living off State benefits.
So since Wednesday we have heard a raft of callers tell radio and TV presenters about their new financial woes. One woman claiming rent allowance but who then broke her ankle and claimed ‘sick benefit’ told of her despair at subsequently being refused further rent allowance, especially now given the news of a one-off extra €40 windfall in December. Meanwhile representatives for the elderly gave a lukewarm reception to the guaranteed maintenance of pension payments for the next four years, bemoaning instead the phasing out of tax age credits and income tax age exemptions, that will cost some better-off pensioners a few quid each week.
The Association of Secondary School Teachers of Ireland then cried foul on the fact that new teachers must now expect to earn approximately €27,800 a year, as against the €30,900 that currently applies, while spokespeople on behalf of ‘mothers and children’ described mothers as the real ‘victims’ of the budget, due to the fact they ‘depend on child benefit to live’.
It is difficult to empathise fully with such arguments, when, comparatively speaking, the entrance salaries in question do not exactly equate to poverty level, while the scenario of mothers being dependent on child benefit raises more questions than answers. One specific question it raises is of course that old nugget, in regard to the social welfare culture in Ireland, which is not only endemic, but worryingly contagious.
Possibly one of the biggest revelations in this regard came from the Minister for Finance himself, Brian Lenihan, this week, who, in the course of a post-budget interview, having stated that the annual social welfare bill of €23 billion a year is costing more than a third of all Government expenditure, lamented the fact that changes to one listener’s ‘earnings’ as a carer had been hit.
People receiving State benefit are not ‘earning’ a living - and using such terms to describe State handouts funded by taxes of the working man and woman in this country - no matter how necessary - only serves to propagate the culture of benefit dependency. Likewise this week, in a Government press release relating to delayed collection of social welfare due to bad weather, people - referred to as ‘customers’ - are advised on arrangements vis a vis late collection of their ‘payments’.
By definition ‘to pay’ means ‘to give (money ) in return for goods or services, ie, it is something awarded to incentivise productivity. It most certainly does not equate to sitting at home watching TV.
If the new Government in power come spring 2011 could do one helpful thing for Irish society, it would be to turn around this crippling mindset from the top down, so that the next generation of children are not reared with a sense of entitlement to ‘living off the State’ and hand-outs, should their efforts to find or create work for themselves prove paltry.
