Emigration the only way out for young Irish in Ireland -- No future, no jobs, no hope if they stay behind

Children taking part in a Sinn Fein organized demonstration 
against emigration in Dublin earlier this year.

Behind the very occasional good news story about new jobs the economic situation here remains absolutely dire.  Not that you would think that watching the way Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Enda Kenny and his ministers turn up at every new job announcement to bask in the glory and suggest that we're emerging from the gloom.

There have been a couple of examples of this in the past two weeks, with the Kerry Group announcing 900 jobs at a new food product research facility to be built in Co. Kildare and the Paddy Power bookmaking business announcing 600 new jobs in their Dublin HQ in online gambling and the supporting technology and marketing.

Both of these are impressive developments in home grown businesses that are doing well, and of course new jobs are not only welcome but desperately needed.   But the way we are all supposed to accept news like this as the dawn of a bright new day and the way the Kenny and his ministers seize on these announcements and milk them to the last drop is worrying for several reasons. 

Firstly these are mainly high end jobs, some of which will require high skill sets and language abilities that will not be that easy to find among Irish school and college graduates.  As in similar job announcements recently, some of these jobs will go to foreign applicants who will come in here to fill the vacancies.   We will come back to this later. 

But the main issue in this week's talking points memo, as Bill O'Reilly would say, is that such announcements give a misleading view on the jobs situation here right now, because that remains extremely bleak. 

The fact is that Ireland is hemorrhaging people now, particularly young people, because they can't get jobs at home. 

The headlines and the statistics are soul destroying, and no doubt you will have seen some of them. 
Most of the figures come from information gleaned in the census last year, which led to the memorable headline that emigration was worse now than at any time since the famine. 

Another emotive headline said that one person was leaving every five minutes.  This was built on figures that showed that 87,100 people a year were emigrating – a daily average of 238, or one person every 303 seconds, which is just over five minutes. 

That was the situation over a year ago, and what level emigration is at now is anyone's guess, although no expert thinks it is coming down. 

Adding information from airline figures, from unemployment figures and other official statistics to the base of the census data allows the experts to estimate the current level of emigration.  But it's not an exact science, partly because there is no real effort to gather enough information.  Official Ireland does not really want to know.  

Read more on Irish immigration here.

The overall point is that we are losing a significant slice of the present generation of young people.  And many of them will never come back on a permanent basis. 

The return of emigration here on a scale that is now higher than in the eighties or in the fifties or probably any time since the famine has, of course, caused a great deal of discussion and comment here. 

But a lot of this is superficial. An in-depth analysis of emigration to identify its root causes would involve many sacred cows in Ireland, and official Ireland is not prepared to go there. 

Of course we know the immediate reason why so many people are leaving right now -- they can't find jobs at home.  The emigration figures are higher than ever before because our population is higher than at any time since the famine, and the economic  crisis we are going through now is deeper than any this century. 

Most of that is of our own making, but our situation is made even worse by the worldwide financial crisis and slowdown.    

That much is clear.  It's stating the obvious.

But what is not clear is why Ireland is so vulnerable and so prone to emigration.  Mass emigration is not unique to us, but we are probably the country in the world best known for it. 

There are historic reasons, of course.  We have a history of emigration that goes back to the famine and because we speak English, the U.K., the U.S., Canada and Australia are easy destinations for our escape.  
There are social reasons as well.  For decades, up to relatively recently, our Catholic belief in the evils of birth control meant that large families were common.

Families with eight or 10 children growing up on modest farms in areas with no industrial development were seen as something to be celebrated, even though the inevitable result was going to be emigration.

That has now changed drastically, with the high number of single parent or one child families bringing down the average number of children per family in Ireland to less than two.

But there are still large families, and the emigration option is deeply ingrained in us at this stage.  

Another critical factor is the failure of our culture and particularly our school system to develop a sense of entrepreneurship.   The idea of starting your own business is not a dream many young Irish have, at least not until they go abroad.  Too often here the aim is to get into one of the professions or the civil service.  

Our school system is still a largely classical education, with rote learning to pass exams and a failure to teach children to think for themselves and to develop initiative.  In spite of recent efforts to get kids to do more math and science, Shakespeare and Irish still take up large chunks of school days. 

Very few schools have computer rooms, and computer skills and programming/information technology is still not a Leaving Cert (high school) subject.   

On top of this we have very poor language skills by European standards.  It's not unusual for a Dutch or French or German teenager to speak English and another foreign language as well as their own.  They study English and often another foreign language, starting in primary (junior) school. 

Here we don't study a "continental" language until secondary (high) school because Irish, the dead language to which we continue to pay lip service, is a compulsory part of every school day and eats up the time for language.

One consequence of this is that many call center and technical support center jobs here (like some of the new Paddy Power jobs mentioned above) end up being filled by immigrants from other parts of Europe. 
During times of strong economic growth these factors tend to masked by the number of jobs in construction and services.  But these weaknesses -- particularly the failure to develop an enterprise culture here and the failure to radically change our education system -- mean that in normal times emigration remains a constant factor in Irish life.  

Another factor that masks our failure is the success of foreign direct investment (FDI) here, the multinational companies (many American) who open plants here to supply product or services to Europe or the wider world. 

The fact that we are English speaking and that we have a young workforce that used to be cheap (and is now becoming cheap again) helps us to maintain this, although the truth is that it is mainly tax driven.  The trouble with FDI is that it is moveable, and we have seen the consequences of that in the past decade as we were undercut by well educated, young workforces in other countries and plants migrated from here.  

The bottom line is that our efforts to create and maintain enough jobs here for our population has never equaled the performance of, say, the Scandinavian countries.  Our society remains locked in attitudes and beliefs that prevent us from developing the way we need to and from tailoring our population level and our education in a way that will allow us to take control of our national destiny rather than forever being forced to accept the humiliation of forced emigration. 

Voluntary emigration will always be an option for our adventurous young people, and so it should be.  But forced emigration of people who do not want to leave is a scandal and a failure. 

The ridiculous amount of immigration to Ireland that happened during the boom -- the census last year showed that we now have half a million non-Irish people living here -- is another facet of our failure to plan and organize our society in a sustainable, sensible manner.   Around half of the emigration figures produced by the census last year related to some of these people going home again, mainly east Europeans. 

But many now regard Ireland as their permanent home, partly due to our higher standard of living, education, housing, health care, welfare and so on.  

Faced with an economy now in crisis and the necessity to make huge cutbacks in state spending, the wisdom of allowing such large scale immigration now seems doubtful, if it ever made sense. 

But what to do about the situation in this era of political correctness where everyone is expected to look on multi-culturalism as a blessing remains to be seen.

The immediate problem is, of course, our flat-lining economy, with little sign that our unemployment level (almost twice the level in the U.S.!) is going to come down anytime soon.  

Even the IMF last week was wondering aloud whether the austerity program here was depressing economic activity so much that jobs would not emerge and that the cure might be worse than the disease.  Thanks, guys.  We could have told you that. 

The answer, as if you didn't know, is to split our banking and our sovereign debt, get the ECB to take a hit on our bank debt and give us a chance. 

Beyond the present crisis we are in -- and it is difficult at the moment to look that far ahead -- we need to grow up as a country and start taking responsibility for ourselves, for how big our families are and for how we are going to provide enough jobs for our population, whatever sustainable level that is.

Only then might forced emigration be consigned to where it belongs -- the history books.  

Ireland is no country for young men or women anymore -- Sky high taxes, lower incomes means only bad news for the young

Karl Miller, Olwen Sheedy, Sam Hopkins and Sinead Donolon have all left,
thought about leaving or are leaving Ireland to find work.(Credit: CNN)

One of the worst aspects of the financial crisis in Ireland is the way it has impacted on young people disproportionately.

By young people, I mean not just those still in college, but those in their twenties and thirties, and even forties.

These include the young couples who bought houses at the top of the boom and are now struggling to pay their sky high mortgages as their income shrivels. When they bought their dream home their pay seemed to be increasing every year; now it's shrinking, all the bonuses and overtime payments have vanished and money is getting tighter all the time.

And of course they can't sell because they're deep in negative equity, with the house worth half what they paid for it, or even less. Then there are those couples in even deeper trouble, the houses in which one or even both partners have lost their job. A recent report predicted that by this time next year, around one-fifth of all mortgages in Ireland will either be restructured or in arrears.

It's not just mortgages that are causing problems either. As the government struggles to cut spending, a lot of free stuff now has to be paid for, in areas like health and education. Meanwhile, the cost of things that are essentials, like gas, electricity, oil, transport and even food have all increased. Petrol prices have increased sharply and for many families a car is an essential, not a luxury, with kids who have to be ferried to school and jobs to get to.

And the burden of taxes is getting heavier all the time. It's not just the income tax at 41 percent on anything over $40,000 a single person earns, but on top of that you pay four percent (and your employer pays 4.5 percent) in pay related social insurance (PRSI), and then there's the new universal social charge (USC) which is seven percent.

So including the employer's PRSI, the effective tax rate on anything a single person here earns over $40,000 is 56.5 percent, not the much quoted 41 percent.  For a married couple, the income at which the marginal rate kicks in is $49,800.

All told, the income tax burden here is already very heavy. And if you have to pay for child care -- unlike other EU countries it's not subsidized here -- it can be very difficult to make ends meet.

On top of all this, many younger people here have significant borrowings (when they bought their dream home they got the plasma screen and the designer kitchen and the nice car), and making those loan repayments is also getting harder.

In many cases, the extras are being sold off. Older people tend to have pre-boom savings and have already acquired and paid for the extras that make life comfortable.

The conjuring trick of taking "social" charges separately out of pay does not fool anyone here anymore -- it's time the government here started calling it all income tax, because that's what it is.

The irony is that many people don't make use of "social insurance" anyway. They don't want to endure long waiting lists in the public health system, and so they go private and pay for treatment.

A lot of them who lose their jobs emigrate so they don't take their welfare payments. And other things like "free" school education ends up costing money because sports and books and equipment all have to be funded by the young parents.

To say that money is tight for so many younger singles and couples here is an understatement.
A survey last April by the Irish League of Credit Unions showed that up to 47 percent of Irish adults have less than $130 to spend by the end of the month once all their essential bills are paid.

Most of them are younger people.Nearly two-thirds of those questioned said they have less to spend than they did last year.

The wave of unemployment here due to the financial crisis also affects younger people much more than the older generation (those in their forties and fifties and beyond).  This is not surprising, since the younger ones may be college leavers or young workers with limited experience, whereas the older ones will often be well established in jobs or professions.   The old rule of last in, first out, also seems to be in operation.

The result of this is that most of the 40,000 plus people now emigrating from here each year are younger people. And it's not just singles, but young couples often with young children as well.

So in all kinds of ways, younger people here are getting a raw deal despite the fact that the crisis was created by the older generation, not the younger generation. And they will go on paying for the mistakes that led to the financial collapse and the bailout for years to come.

Read more: 40,000 are leaving Ireland every year new figures show

It's obviously unfair, but nothing is being done about it (like, for example, a serious program of debt forgiveness to rescue those younger couples now drowning in mortgage debt and negative equity).

All of that is only half the story, however. Where this becomes really shameful is the way the older, established section of Irish society is doing everything it can to protect its privileged position at the expense of the younger generation, no matter the consequences.

A lot of lip service has been paid here to the necessity for burden sharing to get us through the crisis but when it gets down to it, it's I'm alright Jack, and you can look after yourself.

This is happening right across the economy here. In the private sector we have seen the arrival of so called "yellow pack" workers in many companies who get lower pay and poorer conditions and pension entitlements than existing workers doing the same jobs.  

School and college leavers are taken on for periods of "work experience" but never get paid.   There are the "internships" which are paid at low rates, and when it's time for the interns to get proper pay they are let go and a new lot of interns are brought in.

Add to that the growing tendency to offer short term contracts of a year or two rather than permanent jobs and it all adds up to exploitation.

A lot of this has happened while older workers in these companies have stood back and done nothing as long as their positions, pay, and pensions have been protected.   The same thing is happening to a far greater extent in the public service, where state workers and their unions have turned their backs on new entrants.

In this column recently we mentioned the case of teachers. Recent figures show that new school teachers here are now being paid $15,000 less than new teachers who started work in 2010 (starting salary of $36,000, down from $50,000).

They will be doing exactly the same work as their colleagues but will be paid far less. In fact they are getting less than the pensions being paid to older teachers who have retired in the past few years.  Even a teacher who retires at 60 instead of 65 gets more in pension than a new teacher now joining our school system gets in pay.  

Clearly this is deeply unfair. But it's not just in teaching that this kind of stuff is going on -- it's happening across the state workforce.

And to their shame, the unions in the state sector have been a key player in this rotten compromise. Younger entrants in all areas of state services are being given lower pay and poorer conditions in a trade off that allows the older workers (all unions members of long standing) to keep their privileged pay and pensions.

Pay and pensions in the state sector are protected under the Croke Park Agreement, the now infamous deal signed by the last government in 2010 and running up to 2014 under which the state sector unions guaranteed that there would be no strikes. Under the agreement there can be no pay cuts, other than the very limited reductions already agreed at that time by the unions.

But the crucial thing about the Croke Park Agreement is that it applied only to the state workforce at that time. It did not cover new entrants into the state services.

So in return for guarantees on their own pay and pensions, the existing state workforce abandoned the new generation of state workers who would be coming in. In effect this meant that the unions had abandoned the basic principle of equal pay for equal work.

The door had been opened to a two tier system, with those on the good deals that went with the boom hanging on to what they had at the expense of the newcomers.

The Labour Party – which is part of the coalition government -- has lost all credibility on the issue of reform in the state services.  The (Labour) Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform Brendan Howlin became a laughing stock here over the past week because of his failure to implement any reform that affects the existing workforce in the state services as opposed to the sacrificial lambs of the new entrants.

He promised major reform of the system of "allowances" given to state workers -- some deserved, most simply idiotic -- which gives them extra payments to hike up their incomes for doing extra chores (like filing, or using technology) that most people in the private sector would consider a normal part of the job.

These allowances are being scrapped for new entrants, but of the 1,100 allowances in the system which benefit the older generation of state workers, Howlin managed after his review to scrap just one.

Why did this happen? Because the unions, on behalf of the established state workforce, told him to back off.

What we have, we hold. And if the new entrants don't do as well, don't blame us, they said. We're not joining a race to the bottom.

So overall, the pain of cutting back in the Irish economy is falling mainly on younger workers and their families. It's true in the private sector and even more so in the state sector.

It's no country for young men, or young women either.

The line of shame - thousands of unemployed Irish get in line to get out of Ireland

The Overseas Jobs Fair in Dublin two weekends ago attracted thousands of Irish

No doubt you will have seen the pictures last week of the long line of people queuing to get into the Overseas Jobs Fair in Dublin. Effectively they were lining up to get out of Ireland.

It's a shameful thing, when you think about it. But the shame is not theirs.

The shame belongs to the politicians, senior civil servants, bankers and speculators who got this country into the mess it is in.

Inside the fair were exhibition stands with staff from companies in countries like Canada and Australia where they have shortages of skilled workers in all kinds of areas from cow milkers to carpenters, plumbers to painters, truck drivers to teachers.

Outside, the line started early, hours before the exhibition was due to open.

The organizers were taken by surprise at the scale of the demand, with 15,000 or so people turning up.
Eventually, as the day wore on, people in the second half of the line were told they had no hope of getting in. I heard one young woman who had driven up from Waterford being interviewed on radio. She had left home at five that morning.

Now she was going home again, without even getting in to see what was on offer and where. But she didn't sound bitter or angry, just resigned.

That's what being out of work for a couple of years does -- it beats the spirit out of you.

The Overseas Jobs Fair was happening in the RDS, the Royal Dublin Society's huge exhibition center and showjumping arena, just south of the city center. In another part of the complex, at the same time, there was another event taking place, the ard fheis (annual convention) of Fianna Fail. Such irony.
-------------------
Read more: 
Hero NYPD cop who survived bullet wound to head wants back on force 


Nike apologies for offensive St. Patrick’s Day “Black and Tan” sneakers
-------------------
Outside the RDS there were thousands of people lining up to get a job somewhere overseas. Inside, in another part of the complex, the political party which had ruined the economy was in session.

Outside, those in the jobs line looked worn out and depressed. Inside, Bertie Ahern was grinning away, shaking hands. Brian Cowen stood sheepishly to acknowledge applause.

The party delegates and members from all over the country - over a thousand of them -- were determined to show that, whatever about the mistakes of the past, the party is far from dead.

The new leader of Fianna Fail Micheal Martin, at least, had the good grace to sound embarrassed by the situation and to say sorry. He said he regretted the errors of the past, but he was focused on the future.

And there is such anger out there among ordinary people at the scale of the cutbacks in state spending that Fianna Fail could be back sooner than anyone thinks. As time passes the new government will be blamed for the cutbacks, not the old government.

At least Fianna Fail are contrite. Which is far better than being smug, which the present government manages to be in spite of the situation the country faces.

The present government has nothing to be smug about. Granted they inherited an economic nightmare, but their attempts to grapple with the situation and take the hard decisions have been unconvincing.

Last week they were a year in office and they have little to show for it. Over the past year they have failed to stand up to the vested interests here -- from the state sector unions to the wealthy professional groups -- and have instead squeezed the easy targets, mainly the middle class private sector people who can't defend themselves.

Last year, for example, the government put a new tax on private sector pension funds to pay for a new jobs initiative. This particularly sneaky tax will suck hundreds of millions out of private pensions this year, even though a lot of these pension funds are already in trouble.

The government wanted to be seen to be doing something about the 14% unemployment rate, but they can't get any money for their jobs schemes thanks to the new fiscal rules imposed by the EU and the IMF. So they raided private pension funds.

And how many jobs have been created by this initiative? None, of course.

In spite of what the Labor Party thinks, governments can't create jobs. The money has vanished into the black hole of general state spending.

The only policy this new government appears to have is a relentless positivity, an insistence that we have turned the corner, that we're not Greece, that we're on the path to recovery.

The line of people queuing to get into the Jobs Overseas Fairs in Dublin and Cork last week exposed just how wrong that view is.

Our economy is a mess, and thousands of bright young people are leaving the country every month because they feel there's no future for them here.

Meanwhile, the government is radiating sunshine as though everything is fine.

Instead of taking bold decisions to tackle the size and expense of the state sector we can no longer afford, they are tinkering at the margins of the problem. They are so afraid of provoking a reaction from the inefficient, overpaid army of state workers that they are failing to take real action.

Instead of new stealth taxes and extra charges on private sector workers and their pension funds, the government should be cutting its spending much faster so it can give people an incentive to work harder and expand business.

The scale of the problem is staggering, and it's worth recalling how it happened.

Before the boom here really got going, Irish banks funded most of their lending the normal way, from deposits. Once the boom took off, however, that was too slow and too limiting, so the Irish banks started borrowing from other banks, mostly in Germany and France.

In 2003 foreign borrowing by Irish banks was below €15 billion. By the time the boom was peaking in 2007/’08 the Irish banks had borrowed €110 billion.

Most of this was loaned out to fund property speculation here in a boom that was obviously unsustainable. The European banks involved in the gamble, and the European Central Bank (ECB) which was supposed to be regulating banking in Europe, should now be sharing in the cost of the crash.

Instead of doing so, however, they have insisted on getting all of their money back, and the ECB has insisted that the Irish taxpayer must carry all of the cost.

That has placed a huge burden on our national finances since billions have to be diverted every year from anything productive into simply repaying our debts.

This month, for example, we have to repay €3 billion of around €30 billion in debts run up by Anglo Irish Bank which is now being wound up.
-------------------
Read more: 
Hero NYPD cop who survived bullet wound to head wants back on force 


Nike apologies for offensive St. Patrick’s Day “Black and Tan” sneakers
-------------------
Unless the government can cut some deal from the EU on the promissory notes involved, we will have to go on paying €3 billion a year every year for the next decade for the debts of a private bank that doesn't even exist anymore.

That ordinary Irish people have to carry the cost of the lunacy that went on in Irish banks during the boom makes no sense. Yet in the warped world of international finance this is accepted as justifiable, if regrettable.

To their shame, the present government, despite huffing and puffing during the election, seem to accept this as well.

The result is that a huge amount of money that could now be helping us rebuild our economy is instead being sent out of the country to repay the foreign banks that speculated on the Irish property boom.

Most of them have been paid off by now, and to do so the government here borrowed tens of billions from the ECB. That's a big part of why we needed the bailout.

The other half of the bailout was needed because once the property boom here collapsed tax revenue dried up, leaving a huge budget deficit. The rising number of people out of work and needing welfare made the situation even worse.

Also, state spending here during the boom went completely off the rails and we are now left with a system of high welfare and benefits payments of all kinds that people have come to expect but the country can no longer afford.

Spending on welfare and the health system here almost doubled during the boom. Adjusting that now with close to half a million people out of work is going to be very difficult. But it has to be done because we're still spending almost a third more than we raise in tax revenue.

Rather than getting lost in the billions, let me give you just one example of how far state benefits in Ireland are out of line with most other places.

One of the most sensitive subjects you can raise here is the old age pension. In Ireland, you get what they call the contributory old age pension at age 66. It's €230.30 a week, which adds up to €11,975 a year.

In Britain the old age pension adds up to £5,311 a year, equivalent to €6,357 a year. So the Irish state pension is almost twice as much as the U.K. state pension.

The average pay of state workers in Ireland increased by 60% between 2000 and 2009. As a result senior civil servants here are paid around double what their counterparts in other similarly sized countries in Europe earn. Teachers in Ireland, for example, earn almost a third more than their counterparts in the U.K.

Yet any suggestion that old age pensions or pay for teachers or nurses has to be reduced is greeted with fury here. Any attempt to do so is likely to end up in street protests which could quickly descend into Greek-style chaos.

Another huge burden being carried by the taxpayer here is the enormous cost of pensions for state workers, which are guaranteed and paid out of current tax revenue (or state borrowing). They don't depend on stock market performance like private pensions. They are pitched at around two-thirds of earnings.

In some sectors (like the police), state workers can get them at age 60 or even earlier. The cost runs into billions for taxpayers every year.

Yet there has been no reform of the system to reflect what has happened to pensions in the private sector.

Other inefficiencies and anomalies crop up regularly. Last weekend, for example, the lead story in The Irish Times revealed that workers in the state sector taking sick leave costs us over half a billion a year.

Workers in the state sector can take seven uncertified sick days in a 12-month period without losing any pay. Or in other words, they can take a long weekend once a month for seven months of the year. If they are on certified sick leave (they get their doctor to sign a form) they get full pay for six months and half pay after that.

No one is saying that people who are sick should not be supported, but clearly this system invites abuse.
Similarly, no one is saying that state welfare payments and benefits should be reduced below what is necessary, but the wide disparity between benefit levels in our system and in the U.K. needs to be explained.

All of this -- and it's no accident that our senior civil servants and politicians are major beneficiaries of the system as it is -- is a drain on what's left of our economy and a serious blockage to our recovery.

Until we change it and until we stand up to the EU on the bank debt issue, the long lines of young people here attending overseas jobs fairs won't be getting any shorter.

Polish immigrant becomes most famous Pole in Ireland after botched article

Unemployment lines outside Irish welfare offices – it’s not only Irish citizens that are seeking benefits

A POLISH woman called Magda (not her real name) last week became the best known Pole living in Ireland.  That's quite an achievement given that there are around 150,000 Poles living here.

What made Magda famous?   If you've read an Irish newspaper in the past week you will know all about her.

She's famous not because she's done anything remarkable.  Quite the reverse, in fact.  It's because she's living off our welfare system.

Magda recently gave a very frank interview to a leading Polish paper in which she spoke about living in Ireland and what it was like for her. The paper was doing a major feature on Poles living here and how they were doing in the recession.

In particular, Magda talked about our generous welfare system and how it enabled her to have a "wonderful" life here without working.  She talked about walking the beach in the early morning and being free of the stress that comes with a job.

Given that she was talking to a Polish paper, she was probably a bit more direct and upfront than she would have been if she was being interviewed by an Irish paper.

However, unfortunately for her, the Irish Independent got hold of her interview and turned it into a front page story.  In doing so, the paper got its translation badly wrong and implied that Magda had said that life on welfare in Ireland was like a Hawaiian massage (!) but that the area where she lived in Donegal was a s***hole.

She didn't say either of these things.  What she actually said was that she had done a course in Hawaiian massage, and that although she thought Donegal was the most beautiful place in the world, others (presumably locals who can't get a job and are being forced to emigrate) think it is a s***hole.
--------------
Read more: 
More news on Ireland's economy from IrishCentral

Senator Scott Brown says Irish E3 immigrant visa bill is “about to pop”


How much? A round up of property prices from Ireland
--------------

The original inaccurate Irish Independent story caused an outcry, with one local politician even offering to buy Magda a one-way ticket home to Poland.  As first reported, this appeared to be a bare-faced case of "welfare tourism" and on top of that, Magda was insulting our country!

The Irish Independent website had over 600 responses to the story in the first day, most of them outraged at Magda and highly critical of our welfare system.

When the full, correct version of Magda's interview giving a more rounded picture of her life in Ireland was printed a day later, the angry reaction began to abate.  The Polish ambassador was interviewed on radio talking about how misleading and unfair to hardworking Poles the Irish Independent report had been.

And the next day Magda herself was on radio explaining why she was on welfare and how she hoped to start a massage business soon and eventually get off welfare. She also made it clear how much she loves Ireland and Donegal.

At that stage the innate tendency of the Irish to feel guilty about everything kicked in, and Magda became a kind of wronged heroine. The politically correct brigade came out in force condemning the newspaper for getting it so wrong.  There were even mutterings of  racism.

But it's not a simple as that.  Although a few points in the Irish Independent piece were stupidly wrong, the main details in the report were correct.

The Magda case had highlighted a real problem with our welfare system and with EU rules, and that's why it was so contentious.  

It has nothing to do with her as an individual.

She's clearly a lovely person. She's 38, a New Age type who fell in love with Irish culture and music (she was into U2 as a teenager).  She left Poland in 2001, lived in Amsterdam for five years, got into Irish traditional music there and came here in 2006 to go to a music event in Donegal.

Once here she was hooked by the landscape and the music and decided to stay, settling in the small coastal village of Dunfanaghy, near Letterkenny.  She did various jobs like waitressing and bartending in the holiday season, and she worked in a hostel where she was getting  €200 a week but had to work long hours.

Two years ago, unhappy with the stress it was putting her under, she left that job and went on welfare.  Her account of living on welfare in Ireland was the central part of both her original interview with the Polish paper and the report in the Irish Independent.

Here is how she summed it up in the original interview:

“I start my days always the same way. I go to the beach to watch the sunrise. This energizes me for the rest of the day. What’s my life like? Wonderful. I can grow as a person, I can breathe.

“I get a welfare payment – €188 per week plus €59 for the rent. In the winter, (I get) an additional €20 for fuel. It’s €267 per week. Nothing extravagant, but it is enough to have a quiet life.”

She explained that she did not go to pubs and makes her own meals from local produce which she buys cheaply at a local market.  She shops for clothes in the cheapest store (and because she is on welfare she gets a winter clothing allowance from the state).

“After paying for my house I have €172 per week; €40 a month goes for the Internet and a landline phone, €35 for a mobile. Once every two months I pay for electricity, about €100," she says.

She can manage very well on welfare.  “Work for the minimum wage? It’s not worth it. When working in a hostel I earned €200 per week and I was busy from morning until night.  First breakfast for guests, then the reception, between 2 p.m. and 3 p.m. cleaning the rooms, then taking the phone calls again. “Kind of cool, you meet people from all around the world, but when they are knocking on the door at 11 o'clock in the evening, you feel like murdering them."

So Magda gave up her job because she could get more on welfare and have a stress free life with time to enjoy the Donegal landscape. She needed time to think and to revive after her time in the hostel, she told the Polish paper.

She spends her days walking the beaches, surfing, reading, cooking her own food, occasionally doing massage.
--------------
Read more: 
More news on Ireland's economy from IrishCentral

Senator Scott Brown says Irish E3 immigrant visa bill is “about to pop”


How much? A round up of property prices from Ireland
--------------
She also told the paper -- and later repeated in her radio interview -- that she wanted to start a massage business and get off welfare as soon as she could.  She does not like living off the state, she said, and saw this  period as a valuable time for her to prepare to start her own business.

As well as going on welfare, she has done a couple of Fas courses (Fas is the national training agency which helps unemployed people to get back to work).  One of these free courses was in massage therapy, including hot stone massage.  She also said that she might do other courses that would be useful in running a business in the future, like marketing.  

She is not married and does not have children, so the three bedroom house she is renting in Dunfanaghy with the help of her rent supplement payment is big enough to have a massage room.  She was going to start the business months ago but delayed when a friend pointed out that if you're on welfare for at least two years you get state help.

An unemployed person who starts their own business, continues to get full welfare benefits for the first year and over half benefits during the second year.  It's called the back-to-work allowance.

There are other state supports as well for people who have been on welfare for at least two years and want to start a business.   So Magda did the sensible thing and decided to wait until she would qualify.  This also allowed her to do the Fas courses, and she may do more courses.

This aspect of Magda's case alone irritated people since a well known way of staying on welfare here is to keep doing courses.  This week, by coincidence, there is a furious debate going on about the hundreds of millions of euro which have been spent on providing courses and other back to work measures here over the past few years with virtually no real jobs being created as a result.

But leaving aside questions about whether giving Magda a hot stone massage course makes sense, the central argument about her case is whether or not our welfare system is so generous it acts as a disincentive to work, and whether it is attracting people like Magda to come here to live on welfare.

Welfare in Poland gives unemployed people between €25 and €45 a week, depending on where they live and on other factors.  It runs out after a year, after which there is a much lower subsistence payment.

Rent supplements are similarly low, and there are few other welfare payments of the kind that are available here.  Family payments (like children's allowances in Ireland) are about one-tenth the level they are here.


On average, someone on welfare here who takes up the various payments that are available would be at least four times better off than someone in Poland.

EU rules, however, insist that any EU citizen who comes here to live must get the same level of welfare as an Irish person.  That is an extension of the EU's overall policy of giving all EU citizens the right to live and work anywhere in the EU; if the person happens to be out of work while they are here they must get the same benefits as an Irish person.

Secondly, the EU says, welfare benefits in a country like Ireland are matched to the cost of living here.  Because it costs much more to live in Ireland than in Poland, the level of welfare payments here will not attract people to come here from Poland, or anywhere else.

This is nonsense, of course, and Magda is the evidence.  If you're someone like her who is sophisticated enough to be able to live a frugal but healthy life, you can survive very well on welfare here without working.  And if Magda had two or three children she would be getting twice as much in various payments from the state here.

One of several unemployed Polish people here interviewed by Irish papers in the wake of the Magda controversy made it clear.

"You know, I would go back to Poland and then what? I would get 570 Polish zlotys per month (€139).  I would have to move back to my parents (who) live in a village. No, I prefer to stay here", the 28-year-old female said.

Despite the difference in the cost of living, life on welfare in Ireland is much more comfortable than in Poland, especially rural Poland.  So why go back?

The EU policy is fine in theory, but it's hopelessly idealistic in practice and people from other countries, especially Eastern Europe, take full advantage of it.  That's the main reason why, despite the severe recession and high unemployment in Ireland now, very few of the immigrants who came here over the past decade are returning to their home countries of Poland or Latvia or Croatia or wherever.

Denise Charlton, chief executive of the state-supported Immigrant Council of Ireland, commented on the fact that immigrants were staying here last year.

"In recent years, because of the recession, there has been a perception in Ireland that migrants are going home.  But our statistics show that demand for information about migrants' rights and entitlements remains strong, and we know that many of them have made Ireland their permanent home," she said.

Of course Charlton, whose job depends on immigration, thinks this is a good thing.  Many other people here are not so sure, especially since their high taxes are struggling to pay for our enormous welfare bill, which is completely out of proportion to most other countries.  It's one of the main reasons why we have a huge budget deficit which has to be bridged by borrowing.

One example of how out of line we are is that our unemployment payments are close to twice as high as they are in Britain. Why? No one seems to know, other than that during the boom spending on welfare here went through the roof.

A small restaurant owner in Donegal pointed out last week that if he paid workers like Magda more than €200 a week his sandwiches would be too expensive and he would be out of business.  Like him, many employers here believe that our welfare system, not just the unemployment or jobseekers payment but all the other payments as well to those out of work, is a serious disincentive to work, for either Irish people or Polish people like Magda.    

It's not Magda's fault. But the system has to be fixed.