The Irish police had to take those Roma children

Gardai search the bags of Roma gypsies in Dublin earlier this year.

The clumsy handling of the cases involving the removal of two Roma children from their families in Ireland last week has brought an extraordinary level of criticism down on the heads of the Gardai (Irish police).  But the truth is that the Gardai were damned if they did, and could have been damned if they didn’t.

The cases of the two children taken from their Roma families followed the case in Greece where a blond, blue-eyed little girl, named Maria by the press, was removed by police from a Roma family living there.  That story, partly because of the still unsolved case in Portugal of missing Madeleine McCann, got massive coverage all over Europe, including Ireland.  People here and across Europe were wondering if the same kind of thing might have happened to Madeleine.

It’s probably not a coincidence that the two cases in Ireland emerged just a week after the Maria story broke in Greece.  The actions by the Gardai in the cases here were prompted by calls from the public.

In the case of the family in Tallaght, the big blue collar suburb on the west side of Dublin, a person contacted a TV station here (TV3) via Facebook to say there was a blond girl living with Roma parents in a house in the area.  The parents, like most Roma, are dark skinned with dark hair, as are the girl’s siblings.

The TV station then contacted the Gardai who went to investigate, were not completely happy with the answers they were given, and ended up taking the seven-year-old girl away from the family and placing her in care, pending DNA testing.

The second case, which was in the town of Athlone in the middle of Ireland, was similar. The Gardai were tipped off by a member of the public that a blond, blue-eyed child - this time a two year-old boy - was living with a Roma couple.

Again, after some investigation and questioning of the family, Gardai were not satisfied with the information they were given and they removed the child, pending DNA tests.

Both children were seized under the Child Care Act which allows Gardai to remove a child where there is an immediate and serious risk to the health or welfare of that child.

In Greece DNA testing subsequently showed that Maria was not the child of the Roma family she was living with, but she was the child of another Roma family living in severe poverty in Bulgaria who came forward after all the publicity.

The mother had been working as an olive picker in Greece when she either gave Maria away or sold her because she could not care for another baby and needed to get back to Bulgaria to look after her other children.

When the cameras descended last week on the hovel in the Roma camp outside the small town in Bulgaria where this woman and her nine other children live, they discovered something that made everyone here sit up and pay attention.  At least one other child in the family was blond.

Investigators said there was a blond or albino gene in the family bloodline and that the same thing, although not common, was also evident in other Roma families.
Sometimes the effect of the blond gene would skip a generation before becoming visible in a child in a family in which both parents and siblings had the typically dark Roma complexion and hair color.

In Ireland the DNA tests subsequently showed that the two children were the biological offspring of the respective parents.  The little boy had already been returned to the family on the advice of a social worker who knew them.

The little girl was returned to her family as soon as the test results were available.  The parents told reporters that there were other relatives who were also blond.

An outpouring of recrimination then started as immigrant and traveler support organizations here berated the Gardai and accused them of racial profiling.  This accusation was extended by other politically correct people into wider allegations about racism in Ireland and about how, as a society, we are far too quick to jump to conclusions about Roma people and our own travelers.

The spokespeople involved were full of outrage and self-righteousness.  Where was the evidence that there was “an immediate and serious risk to the health or welfare” of the children which is what the law requires before the Gardai can take them away?

Both children appeared to be well cared for. But that was not the issue here.  The issue was the suspicion that the children did not belong to the parents.

And the problem for the Gardai was that many Roma families move around between various countries in Europe.  The Gardai could have done some questioning and taken swabs for DNA testing but not taken the children away.

But suppose they had done that and while they were waiting for the results one of the families had vanished”  And if the DNA then showed that the child they had was not theirs, what then?
We would then have had headlines about how the incompetent Irish police failed to rescue a stolen child when they had the chance.  As I said, for the Gardai it was a case of damned if you do and possibly damned if you don’t.

Was there racism or racial profiling involved?  We don’t know yet, although an investigation here by our ombudsman for children is underway, with powers to question all those involved, including the Gardai.

But the assertion now being made that the Gardai should have totally ignored the obvious difference in appearance of the two children from the other members of their families is another example of political correctness gone too far.  The rights of a child, particularly a child who is possibly at risk, must supersede everything else.

Another flawed argument being put forward here is that since the Gardai only took away the two blond children and not their brothers and sisters, they could not claim that there was “an immediate and serious risk to the health or welfare” of the children.  If that had been the case, if the Gardai had decided there was a danger of physical or sexual abuse, all the children would have been removed, the argument goes.

But that also misses the point.  The danger to the “welfare” of the two blond children arose from the possibility that they had been taken from their natural parents somewhere else.
It also arose from the fact -- and it is a fact no matter what the politically correct say — that some Roma families in Europe have been involved in child trafficking, and that some Roma families force children to work as street beggars in the way that used to be common among Irish travelers.

To ignore that reality would be a mistake. It is the context in which the Gardai had to make a decision on whether to act.

Being aware of the wider context is not racist. Making assumptions in individual cases on that basis alone would be racist, and we do not know yet if that is what the Gardai did.

That said, the Gardai did not handle this matter well.  They could have talked gently to the families about wanting to reassure everyone, they could have taken swabs for DNA and they could have left the children in their homes with a police presence outside to ensure nobody vanished before the tests were complete.

In retrospect, that would have been a more sensible and humane approach.  But the national orgy of guilt and self-recrimination that is now underway in Ireland, led by the politically correct, is ridiculous.

The Gardai act to protect children, not to harm them.  We all need to calm down a bit and get real about this.

In that context, the comments last week by Michael Moran, the assistant director of Interpol’s Human Trafficking and Child Exploitation section in Europe, who is based in France and happens to be an Irishman, are instructive.

He said that the “migration habits” of many Roma people, and the involvement of some of those who move between Romania and Bulgaria and other European countries in theft and begging gangs, make them susceptible to human trafficking for exploitation purposes.  He referred to “the problem of organized street gangs, child street gangs, theft gangs, organized begging, forced marriages, child marriages within their (the Roma) community.”

Moran also warned against applying this to all Roma people in a racist manner and said that the Roma community themselves were working to stop this kind of activity.  It is important that assumptions are not made about all Roma simply because they are Roma.

There are now estimated to be over 5,000 Roma living in Ireland, most of whom have arrived since 2007 when Romania and Bulgaria joined the EU.  Many of them are now settled permanently in housing here, with children in school.

But there is still a problem with some Roma here who are involved in begging, shoplifting, theft and other activities.

You may remember the notorious case four years ago of the Rostas clan of up to 100 people who were discovered living in squalor in the middle of a big roundabout on the M50 motorway that encircles Dublin. The conditions for the women and children in this camp, which was invisible in the middle of the overgrown trees and bushes on the roundabout, were appalling.  They were being brought into the city every day in vans by their men to beg.

They were all eventually deported, and cleaning up after them was a major operation.  But many of them subsequently came back and their leader, Barron Rostas, rented a house in the inner city to house them, from where the street begging operation continued.

Gardai estimated the operation was making several thousand euro a week, and they began an investigation when it was discovered at one point that Rostas had wired €40,000 ($54,000) back to Romania.

That begging operation is still going on, and the current estimate is that there are at least 60 Roma from this clan and other families begging on the streets of Dublin every day -- women and children, because the men do not “work.”

The lifestyle of some extended Roma families or clans -- as with some Irish traveler families — is difficult for settled society to accept and live with.   In France, they have deported thousands of Roma back to Romania and Bulgaria in recent years due to the problems they were creating.

In some German cities a lot of the prostitution is carried on by Roma women from Bulgaria.  In other European countries, particularly in tourist areas, Roma clans have proved a problem due to aggressive begging which often culminates in bag snatching or other forms of theft.

Life can be very cheap when people live in the abject poverty we saw when the cameras visited the Roma camp in Bulgaria where Maria’s real family lives.

Embarrassed by the conditions seen by TV viewers around the world, the Bulgarian authorities have now taken two of the nine children in the family into care, and it seems very unlikely that Maria will be returned to them.

Here in Ireland, the Gardai need to be very careful never to act on the basis of racial profiling.  But particularly in cases where children are involved, never investigating is never going to be an option.

The real mess is Reillycare, Ireland's health care a budgetary hot potato

Ireland's Minister for health James O'Reilly

I don't have to tell all of you over there that the health service in a country can be one of the most contentious policy areas for a government.  Just look at the reaction to Obamacare! 

From a European perspective Obamacare is a fairly modest attempt to provide a modest universal health care system that is regarded as normal for a civilized country on this side of the Atlantic.  Yet on your side of the pond many people see it as so radical and outrageous that it resulted in the shutdown of the entire U.S. government. 

Of course the inept rollout of the plan is not helping, but it's far too early to say whether Obamacare is going to be workable and beneficial for most Americans -- especially lower income Americans -- or whether it's going to be the total disaster the Republicans predict.

Mind you, none of us here in Ireland can afford to sneer at the shenanigans that are going in the U.S. over Obamacare.  The health service here is a financial mess and has, not for the first time, turned out to be the hot potato of the annual budget. 

The budget for 2014 unveiled last week was another cost cutting exercise as we battle to get the state finances under control and reduce the deficit between state spending and revenue.  And since the second biggest item in the budget every year (after social welfare) is health spending, there are severe cutbacks on the way again. 

The cost to the state of the health service in Ireland peaked at a massive €15.5 billion at the height of the boom in 2008, and by last year this had been cut to around €14billion.  But it's still far more than we can now afford and it needs to be reduced further.  It is one of the areas identified by the IMF and the EU for action in the program of deficit reduction that followed the bailout.

Despite the reduction since the 2008 peak there was a substantial overrun in the budgeted health spending last year, and this year looks like being no different. This is not completely the fault of the Minister for Health, Dr. James Reilly.  Sticking to the spending plans is very difficult because the service is demand led -- it expands to meet the needs of patients.  

Because of the overrun last year and the expected overrun this year, it has now emerged that health spending in 2014 will have to be cut by €1 billion, not the €666 million that was announced in the budget last week (and led to lots of devil worship jokes).  That scale of reduction is going to be incredibly difficult to accomplish, especially for a minister already seen as being under the most pressure in the government with regular opposition calls for his resignation. 

But Dr Reilly -- and he is a medical doctor -- is no pushover, and he is determined that he will preserve the public health service even as he cuts costs.  He means well, but there are major question marks over his ability to deliver. 

One of those calling for his resignation last weekend because of the confusion over health spending was the present leader of Fianna Fail, Michael Martin. This is an extreme case of the pot calling the kettle black since Martin was minister for health when some of the most disastrous decisions about our health service were taken.  One of those decisions at the end of 2004 was the setting up of the Health Service Executive (HSE), a new independent body to run health services in Ireland. 

Up to then, although funded by central government and supposedly guided by the Department of Health, services were run by around 10 local health boards which had local politicians and community leaders on them, and which ran hospitals where the treatment you got and when you got it sometimes depended on who you knew.  

Different criteria were used in different areas.  In some areas the bishops had more influence on boards than was healthy for anyone.  And keeping to budgets was always a problem. 

The staff they hired as administrators and managers often had no qualifications in health, and there was a strong element of jobs for the boys and political connections at play.  Pay was good and expenses even better!  

All told, the health boards seemed to typify all that was wrong in the country at the time, especially after years of Fianna Fail cronyism, and no one was sorry to see them getting the chop.  

So the new HSE seemed like a good idea at the time, an independent body to run a national health service on a professional basis.  By January 2005, when the HSE started, Mary Harney was minister for health and she set about the task with energy.   

But problems soon emerged.  Part of the changeover included a government decision (to keep the unions happy) that the existing health board staffs would simply transfer to the HSE so that no one would have to lose their job.

The trouble with that decision was that many of them were not competent to work in the new organization. But since this was the boom time in Ireland nobody cared and the HSE simply started recruiting professional people to work alongside the existing staff. 

As one doctor pointed out recently, in 1997 there were approximately 6,000 administrative staff in the old health boards system, but today there are more than 15,000 administrative staff in the HSE that replaced them.  And of course all these people have guaranteed jobs for life and generous guaranteed pensions.

In spite of the numbers, the administration of the HSE always seems to be a mess, with money unaccounted for, budget overruns, hospital services suddenly cancelled towards the end of the year when annual funds run out and so on.  The number of frontline staff in the HSE actually providing services used to be over 85,000 (this includes agency staff paid by the HSE) but that number has fallen by around 10,000 since Reilly took on the job some three years ago.   

And as part of the budget, Reilly said that another 1,000 staff would have to go over the coming year. The reason is that about 70 percent of the total health spend by the state goes on pay and pensions, so real savings requires staff cuts.  

Reilly's mantra is that he is leading a change in the HSE where everyone will have to do more with less; more services at lower cost, at a time when the population is growing and there is more demand than ever on health services.  It's not easy, but so far he seems confident that he can deliver even though it's the worst time in the history of the state to be minister for health.

To be fair to him, he has accomplished certain things in his three years in office.  He has cut the staff numbers by 10,000 and (if you allow for inflation and other factors) cut spending by around €3 billion. He has managed to do this at a time when the population has increased and hospital admissions have grown.  

One of the biggest challenges Reilly faces is what to do about the medical card system, under which people can get free health care, medicines and other services.  The system was originally designed to give poor people access to health care.  

The problem is that although the income limit for a medical card is low, there are allowances for family size and circumstances (things like rent payments or travel costs) which were widened during the boom years.  And of course we now have close to half a million people out of work (the medical card income limit is close to the individual welfare payment level), and they are all entitled to cards.
 Discretionary cards are given to those above the income limits (usually people with chronic diseases), but that is open to abuse.

The result is that almost half the population now have medical cards.  In the four years after the boom turned to bust the HSE had to increase the number of medical cards by almost 40 percent.  

No one wants to deny health care to the poor.  But there is no doubt that there is considerable waste in the system, as there inevitably is in any system which is free. 

The HSE estimates that the average person with a medical card now costs the service around €280 a year for visits to the doctor, and over €800 a year in drugs charges.   That's the AVERAGE -- and remember half the population has a medical card.

That's over €1,000 each a year, which is an awful lot of money, far more than many people who have to pay for their own health care will clock up in a year.  

Despite efforts to control the cost -- some cards are general doctor-only cards, there is now a minimal charge when a prescription is filled, there is now a reduced income limit for the over-70s who can get a card --  the bill to the state for all of this is enormous.

What about the other half of the population?  They used to be mainly looked after by the Voluntary Health Insurance (VHI) organization, a state sponsored body set up years ago to enable the middle class to pay for their own health care through affordable health insurance.

The trouble is it's no longer affordable, and the government has made it even more expensive as it reduces incentives for those in the middle class to pay for their own health insurance either through the VHI or other companies.

Tax deductions have been slashed, beds in public hospitals are now more expensive for those with private insurance, and other steps have been taken to squeeze the barely coping classes as the middle class here are now called. 

The irony is that tens of thousands of people in the middle class here have dropped their health insurance as a result, and they will now be an extra burden on the public health system.  Faced with high bills for energy and many other things, they have opted to drop their soaring health insurance.

One of the most contentious health cuts in this budget was the lower income limits for medical cards for the over-70s.  This is now down to €600 a week for an individual, and it is estimated that this will reduce the number of over-70s qualifying by 10 percent.  This follows a similar reduction last year.

It may still seem high, but the problem is that medical costs for old folk can be very expensive, especially for those with ongoing conditions, so that paying the medical bills may mean there isn't enough left to pay for adequate heat or food.

All told, it's a half and half mess -- a public service that is costing far more than it should, and a private system that is becoming unaffordable.  And no one seems to have the right medicine for our health problem.  

Ireland's latest austerity budget hits the old and young

Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform Brendan Howlin and Minister for
 Finance Michael Noonan at a press conference on Tuesday to discuss the budget.  

On Tuesday in the Dail (Irish Parliament), the Minister for Finance Michael Noonan introduced his budget for the coming year, taking a further €2.5 billion out of an economy that is already on its knees. One-third of this was in tax hikes and two-thirds was in reduced government spending.

This is the seventh austerity budget we have had since 2008, the cumulative effect of which has been a budgetary adjustment of over €30 billion euro.  If a similar exercise were carried out on a proportional basis in the US over a similar five-year period, America's budget problem would be solved and its spiraling debt problem would be under control.  That gives you some idea of the scale of the "adjustment" that has been going on here since the crash hit us in 2008.

Austerity budget has become a jargon term, but what it means is actually quite simple.  An austerity budget reduces the amount of state money in the country by a combination of tax hikes and state spending cuts. Here in Ireland, the aim has been to get our spending back in line with our reduced tax revenues after the crash in 2008,  to get the country out of the EU-IMF bailout program which has been funding us since 2010, and to restore our economic sovereignty.

It's been a tough few years and it's got harder with each passing year.  The reason is that the fat in government spending was stripped away in the early years.  At this stage we are down to the bone, and there are no easy choices left when it comes to cutting state spending.

So what we got in yesterday's budget was some very nasty medicine, even if there was an attempt to coat it with a sprinkling of sugar.  One example which immediately made the headlines was the ending of the €850 state grant to help low income families pay for a funeral; this was taken away from everyone except those in extreme poverty who are too poor to bury their dead.

That headline grabber was one of dozens of small "adjustments" in state spending which are going to hit people here in the coming year.  The reason the net was spread so wide was because the usual big sources of government revenue, income taxes and VAT or sales taxes, have already been pushed to the limit here.
So there was no change in income tax rates in this budget.  An example will show you why -- when you get to €32,800 income here you pay a rate of 52 percent on anything extra you earn.

But a few miles up the road in Northern Ireland (and in the rest of the U.K.) you would have to be earning the equivalent of over €150,000 before you would hit that tax level.

With the big revenue generators here at their maximum the government has been forced to look elsewhere to raise cash.  So we have death by a thousand budget cuts.  And a great many of these "adjustments" are aimed at old people.

The perception is that old people have escaped most of the pain in the crash so far because many of them are mortgage free and have built up some savings, so the government views them as fair game.

The interest you earn on savings in Ireland is hit by DIRT tax (deposit interest retention tax).  This is deducted by whatever financial institution you have your savings in before they pay you your interest.
It used to be 33 percent, and with this Budget it is now going up to 41 percent.   And when you add the welfare levy on top of that it becomes 45 percent, so you lose almost half your interest.

This a particularly nasty form of taxation because for many old folk their savings pile has been accumulated from income over the years they have already paid tax on.  In addition to that, the emergency government levy on private pension funds which was introduced a couple of years ago has been extended, even though it was supposed to be a temporary measure.

This reduces the value of the pension funds built up by people who have worked hard to pay for their own retirement.   They were allowed to put before-tax income into these pension funds, but of course they have to pay income tax on their pensions when they get them.  

The DIRT move is aimed at older people sitting on cash piles at a time when the government wants more spending to stimulate job creation.  But it's a shoddy way to treat old people, and we could yet see another "grey brigade" revolt by pensioners here as a result, like the demonstration a few years back when the last government tried to take away their medical cards.  

In this budget this government is limiting the number of over-70s who can get the medical card which gives them free medical care here.  Any person over 70 who has an income of over €500 a week will no longer get a full medical card.  And other allowances poorer old folk get, like the telephone allowance, are being chopped or pared back.    

It's not just the old who have been targeted.  Also being hit are the young.

Welfare for unemployed people here is €180 a week, but that was reduced to €100 a week some time ago for the 18-year-old school leavers here who can't get a job.  That lower rate will now apply to everyone under 24.

The government is insisting that this is to encourage younger people to find a job or go on one of the training courses.  The problem is that there are not enough jobs around for young people, and there seems little doubt that one of the results of this cutback will be higher emigration among school and college leavers.  And we're talking forced, not voluntary, emigration because if you don't have enough to exist on you don't have a choice.    

Other changes in the budget included a further hike in student fees and in drug prescription charges (these are the payments low income people have to make when they get their free medicines), and of course "the old reliables" took a bashing with another 10 cent on cigarettes and a pint and an extra 50 cent on a bottle of wine.  These are on top of the already high taxes on tobacco and alcohol and are certain to add to the huge illegal tobacco trade we have here.

There were several spoonfuls of sugar scattered around to make the medicine go down.  The most high profile was the free doctor care for all kids under five.   But this is a universal entitlement so everyone gets it, including the children from well-off families who don't need it.

Meanwhile, other parts of our creaking health service are desperately short of funds.  And sick old folk are losing free services.

Another sweetener was the ending of the air travel tax which will be good news for people visiting here. That was just one of a number of measures aimed at job creation, in tourism and other sectors.

The government is claiming it all adds up to a €700 million stimulus to kick-start the economy, which is now showing slight signs of growth.

Overall, the reaction here to the budget -- unless you are part of the grey brigade -- was that it does not seem as bad as people were expecting.   But that is mainly because it is something of a stealth bomber budget hitting numerous small targets.  And of course next year, the property tax kicks in at the full rate and the year after we will start paying water charges.

We also have at least one more austerity budget to get through, and maybe more.  Any sign that we are failing to get our state finances in order again will make the markets that will have to lend to us after the departure of the IMF deeply suspicious.

To reassure them and to show them we can repay interest on debt we will have to produce a modest budget surplus in the coming years. That means tight control of state spending will have to go on, unless revenue rebounds and that's not going to happen any time soon.

Overall, this budget is just another stop on the track to recovery.  We are near the end of the austerity line. But we're not there yet.

The people have spoken but is Ireland’s Senate still relevant

The Senate referendum Dublin count center on Saturday.

Against all the predictions by political experts and opinion polls in the past few weeks, the government lost the referendum last Friday that proposed the abolition of the Seanad, or Senate.

The Senate, the upper house in the Dail (Irish Parliament), is famous for being useless.  But it is part of our structure of governance, enshrined in the Constitution, which is why a referendum was required to get rid of it.

Most of the commentators were expecting that a majority would vote for the change, even though there are always people who are suspicious of any government meddling with the Constitution and will oppose any change on that basis alone.

No one was expecting a landslide — there was such little interest that the voter turnout was just 40 percent — but the general feeling was that the proposal to abolish the Senate would be approved.
So the 52-48 percent result of the national vote against abolition was a  surprise, if not a total shock.

Many moons ago, way back in the 1970s, I began my career in journalism as a trainee sub-editor on the Irish Press, then one of the main morning papers in Ireland. Straight out of college I didn’t know much.  But you learned fast on the subs desk, where the content for the next day’s paper was edited and shaped into pages.

After a couple of years working on news pages I was promoted to being the Dail sub-editor, the person who put together the page about the day’s proceedings in the Dail and Senate.

I was very pleased with myself. I thought I was very important, selecting which Dail stories to give prominence to and editing them as I saw fit.  Such power!

But the delusions about my importance faded quickly.  Yes, there were days when events in the Dail topped the news. But most of the time the Dail debates were of little consequence and hopelessly boring.

Even worse — far worse — were the debates in the Senate. I spent a couple of years of my young life wading through that stuff (and I’m not blaming the reporters who had to cover the Senate and file the stories) in search of material worth printing.  Usually it was a fruitless exercise.

I learned a lot about the Senate in those two years.  Unlike most people, I had to read a lot of the guff that was spouted in the chamber.

So I learned the hard way how useless the Senate was.  And in the 30-plus years since, from what I have read, the debates in the Senate have not got any better.

For that reason you won’t be surprised to learn that last Friday I was among those voting yes for abolition.
For American readers, our Senate is nothing like the Senate in the U.S. (although Congress is hardly an example to anyone at the moment).

The problem with the Senate in Ireland is that it is an elitist, undemocratic talking shop with very  little power and not much purpose.

Like the House of Lords in Britain, which it vaguely resembles, it’s full of old (and a few young) windbags in love with the sound of their own voices.

Legislation going through the Irish Parliament has to be passed by both the Dail and the Senate before being signed into law by the president.  The Senate can delay bills coming from the Dail for 90 days, but it cannot stop them.  It does not have the power to delay financial bills.

So, as I said, it’s a talking shop with no power. That might not matter all that much, but the make-up of the Senate is disturbing from a democratic point of view.

Following every general election, the Senate is dissolved and a new Senate comes into being.  The 60 members of the Senate are not elected by the people — 11 are appointed by the taoiseach (prime minister) six are elected by the graduates of Irish universities and the remaining 43 seats are elected by the members of city and county councils and members of the incoming Dail and outgoing Senate.

To run for one of those 43 seats you have to be nominated by one of five panels representing various interest groups, cultural organizations and professional bodies, or by members of the Dail.

The five panels — cultural, agricultural, labor, industry, administrative — include almost every organization of note in the country, from the Royal Irish  Academy of Music to the Irish Greyhound Owners and Breeders Federation and everything in between (the professional bodies of lawyers, doctors, teachers, business leaders, engineers, accountants and so on).

The idea that de Valera had when this structure for the Senate was put in place in the 1937 Constitution was that it would provide an intellectual elite who would improve legislation with their experience and original thinking.

De Valera liked to ramble on about the thatched cottages and the maidens dancing at the crossroads, but as a former math teachers at one of Ireland’s most exclusive schools he never lost that tendency to elitism he had.

Even though as a university graduate I had a vote in Senate elections, it always made me uncomfortable that I could vote but my father could not because he never got to college.

Over the decades, probably because it was powerless and therefore largely irrelevant, the Senate was ignored by the public and became a play thing of the political parties.

It was used by them as a nursery and a retirement home — a  nursery for baby politicians they were grooming for a Dail seat, and a retirement home for mature Dail members who had lost their seats and needed somewhere to rest and recuperate.  And of course there was a good salary and expenses as well as pension benefits.

Debates in the Senate are similar to the stuff you hear in university debating societies, a mixture of outrage, piety and a disconnect from the real world, with lots of preening, inane jokes and facile point-scoring to cover up a lack of in-depth knowledge of the subject.

Some of the senators from the universities are the worst.  Most of the members of the Senate, who owe their seats to the votes of the  elected members of local councils around the country, divide along party lines in Senate votes.  The predictability of their votes added to the lack of any real power makes the proceedings of the upper house very much a non-event.

Yet despite all this, given the opportunity, the people voted to keep the Senate instead of getting rid of it.

Does it matter?  Not a great deal, is the answer.

It would have saved us somewhere between €10 million and €20 million a year, but that’s a drop in the ocean of our spending.

It would also have meant fewer politicians around, which has to be  good, but since no one was listening to them anyway it hardly matters.

Does it have ramifications for Taoiseach Enda Kenny who put forward the idea and then failed to do much campaigning to back it up?

Not really is the answer to that one.  Yes, it’s embarrassing for him because it was a proposal that came from him alone rather than from his party, but that’s about it. It’s a one-day  wonder.

There is a great deal of nonsense being talked here about the defeat being a threat to Kenny’s leadership. It will take a lot more than this to rattle him.

There is also a lot of nonsense being talked about pressure now being on the government to radically reform the Senate — ignoring the fact that any substantial reform will require constitutional change and therefore another referendum.  And that ain’t going to happen ... once bitten, etc.

Far more important for Kenny is the budget, which is now just a week away.  We know it’s going to be another savage round of cuts in state spending and tax hikes in one form or another.

By this time next week no one will be talking about the Senate. And as usual no one will be listening to it.  

Ireland’s 'brain drain' an indictment of emigrants view of their own country

A large crowd attended a working abroad expo in Dublin last week.  

There has been a good deal of head scratching here over the past week since that report by a University College Cork (UCC) research group on emigration was published.

It showed that almost half  (47 percent) of the emigrants now leaving Ireland had full time jobs here.  And that a high proportion (62 percent) of emigrants aged 25 to 34 had third level (college) degrees.

This prompted headlines here about a “brain drain” and puzzlement among news commentators about why people with jobs would decide to leave.   It seemed to be a pretty damning indictment of the state of Ireland and a telling revelation of the real attitude of Irish people to their own country and its future.  

There’s no need to repeat in this column all of the detail of the report by the UCC Emigre Project.  There’s a good summary on our sister website Irish Central, and if you want to read the full report you can find it easily on line by searching for UCC  Emigre Project and clicking on report.

Let us just say here that this report on emigration (the title is “Emigration in an Age of Austerity”) goes far beyond other surveys in recent years.   It has real credibility and offers data that provides a lot of food for thought.

The researchers approached the project on three levels.  They used household surveys covering 2,500 homes across Ireland, they compiled data from an online survey of 1,500 emigrants already abroad, and they interviewed 500 would-be emigrants at jobs fairs being run in Dublin and Cork by foreign companies offering jobs abroad.  In addition to that, 60 detailed interviews were done via Skype and Viber with emigrants who had already left.

This is a substantial amount of research, and the report based on it is an important insight into contemporary emigration from Ireland and the diverse reasons it is happening.   It is a scientific study, not the anecdotal kind of commentary that is usual when dealing with emigration.  The report is well worth reading and provides a lot of food for thought.

What it does not provide, however, are complete answers about the fundamental reasons that people here are leaving.  This is not a criticism of the report, rather an indication of the complexity of the reasons people here have for deciding to go.

Readers with long memories will remember the notorious remark made back in the 1980s by the then Tanaiste (Deputy Prime Minster) Brian Lenihan Senior who said  “we can’t all live on a small island.” Lenihan seemed to be suggesting that Ireland, partly due to our big Catholic families, would never be able to provide jobs for all its children.

Following an outcry at the time he moderated this to suggest that a lot of young Irish just wanted to see the world.   That caused almost as much grief, although there was probably a good deal of truth in both of Lenihan’s theories, not that many people here were brave enough to say so openly.

Scroll down 30 years and early last year we found our present minister for finance, Michael Noonan, making the same mistake when he referred to emigration by young Irish people as “a free lifestyle choice.”

Needless to say he was eaten for breakfast by the nationally correct here, even though he pointed out that the world had changed, with cheap travel, Skype and so on.

The interesting thing about the new UCC report is that it gives some backing to what both Lenihan and Noonan were saying.

Yes, we had high unemployment in the 1980s, and yes, we have high unemployment now, but this report suggests that many people here do leave to experience life elsewhere, even if they have a job.  They are what Noonan called “lifestyle” emigrants, leaving because they want to, not because they have to.

On a superficial level, the UCC report shows that currently 47 percent of emigrants are in that category; they told researchers they wanted  to travel and experience life and work elsewhere.

But that’s only half the story.   They also said that they were influenced by the lack of job security and job satisfaction here, with more contract work, poor pay levels and not much hope of rapid promotion and pay increases.

Many of them are people with professional qualifications that give them good prospects in other countries, in areas like finance, health and information technology.

So yes, they do have jobs, but they feel they can do better elsewhere.

The other side of the coin is the 53 percent who don’t have a full time job here when they leave. But even among this group, what is happening is more complex than that figure suggests.

First off, around 13 percent had part-time jobs but left anyway.  Another group, around 15 percent, were former students, many of whom had just graduated and may not have spent much time looking for work here.  The rest, around 23 percent, were unemployed, including those who had been out of work for some time.

Of course unemployment and the lack of jobs here is a big part of the emigration story, especially in the construction sector.  There are a lot of people who just can’t find a job here, whatever category they are in.

But construction is the worst, and the report says that 17 percent of those emigrating are from that category, the blocklayers, plasterers, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, roofers, and so on.

But when you put it all together you begin to understand that there is a lot more to our emigration story than is initially apparent.

For a start, the long-term unemployed, those who have been on welfare here for several years or more, perhaps since the crash started in 2007/’08 or even before that, are not a significant part of the story.

They are far more likely to stay here on welfare than to emigrate because they are low-skilled or don’t have the initiative or competence to move to another country.   (This is not peculiar to Ireland, of course.)

On the other hand, looking at the overall picture in the report, you also see that there is no easy answer to the question of why people who have full time jobs here are emigrating?

The answers in the report suggest that people in general have a very jaundiced view of our future. Reading between the lines you can sense this.

You want to know why people who have jobs are leaving Ireland?  Let me be a bit more specific than the report can be.

One of the fundamental reasons is the depressed atmosphere in Ireland.  Since we lost our economic sovereignty and entered the bailout program there seems little reason to stay, especially if you are highly qualified and just starting out on your career.  

Why stay? The reality is that we’re going to be paying for the economic mess for years, with high taxes, poor state services and living standards under pressure all the time.
Most companies here are just hanging in there, hoping for a recovery.  They can’t afford pay levels like they could during the boom.

Even those who are doing okay use the collapse as a reason to keep pay levels low.  Everyone is expected to work harder and longer, to stay with it until the job is done even if there is no extra money.

Among state workers, despite having a level of protection that the private sector workers don’t enjoy, pay is under pressure as extras and premiums are cut out of the system.

So we are now threatened by a teacher strike. And more teachers and nurses and other qualified state workers are leaving.

At the other end, taxes have increased, the government has raided pension funds, there are extra charges like property tax, and water charges are on the way.   Health insurance has skyrocketed, as have energy bills and utility bills.  Everything seems to be as expensive as ever, even though we were told prices would come down now that the boom is over.

The government claims that our income tax levels are comparable to those in other European countries.  The nominal rates are.  But the reality is that the extra charges that are applied to income put us up there as one of the highest taxed countries with one of the poorest levels of state services.

Our core welfare rates are high for the unemployed, the disabled, old age pensions and so on.  But for younger working singles or families there is very little in terms of support for things like child care.  And the taxes and charges burden is relentless.

These are the people who are struggling (and many failing) to pay mortgages, who are leading a very pared back lifestyle and still can’t make ends meet.

These are the people who have jobs and who turn up in surveys showing that so many families here have maybe €50 or €100 left over every month when all the essential bills have been paid.  You won’t do much partying on that.

There is another factor in all this.  That is the growing realization that Ireland is not a fair society, that there are so many people here who have escaped the austerity program and have huge salaries, often paid by the state.

The huge pensions being enjoyed by those who were key players in the disastrous boom and bust that brought the country to its knees is another sore point.  Some people can party on.

The gulf between the leaders of Irish society on huge salaries and/or pensions (and sometimes it’s both!) and the ordinary people who they praise for accepting austerity is not just enormous, it’s obscene.

And it’s not just the leaders. It’s the golden circle of legal, financial and senior civil servants who are still doing fine while everyone else struggles to survive.

Faced with all of this, is it really surprising that new graduates or people who have full time jobs are deciding to leave?

When the realization sinks in that nothing is going to change any time soon and tax hikes and cutbacks are not going to ease off for years, the question is not why would you leave, but why would you stay?