MY OTHER LIFE:In our continuing series – in which Irish Times writers consider their alternative lives – FRANK MCNALLYrecalls his time working in the Department of Social Welfare in the 1980s
THE DAY I left the Department of Social Welfare, my principal officer called me in to say goodbye. I wasn’t expecting this. As a humble deciding officer, my work did not involve much contact with the higher ranks. So I was even more surprised by his note of contrition.
I wouldn’t be back, he predicted (it was officially a career break, for one year, extendable to five). But if I did return, I was to make sure and visit him again. “I don’t think we ever used your talents properly,” he said. “So we’ll make amends the next time.” Then he shook my hand and added: “But you won’t be back.”
I didn’t share his confidence. It was October 1988 and the Social Welfare budget was about the only growth area in Ireland’s economy. That and the knowledge that my (unspecified) talents had been noticed by management made it seem, suddenly, a very bad time to quit.
Already I felt nostalgic for my immediate boss, Mary: a matronly Mayo woman who, although she recorded my many lates in the attendance ledger, each with a red X, had otherwise indulged my need to bridle against the confines of the Civil Service. The office, on Dublin’s Townsend Street, had been a friendly place to work. And being on the front line of a crisis, it had a certain sense of mission too. All this I was leaving.
But I had unfinished business, and it had been put it off long enough.
As a schoolchild in rural Monaghan, I used to dream about being a journalist. Unfortunately, my ideas about how to make this happen were dream-like too. I didn’t know any journalists; the local paper was unmoved by the naive charm of my hand-written letter of introduction; and the national press might as well have been the foreign legion, such was its mystique.
Also, I had an uncle who had made it big in Dublin – as a civil servant – and knew how the world worked. When I sought his advice, he assured me it would be a waste of time trying to infiltrate the national newspapers. “It’s all nepotism with that crowd,” he said.
So I abandoned my modest dream. And when the time came, I drifted out of school and into the same Civil Service. Where, courtesy of appalling Irish, I started at the very bottom: an assistant clerkship in the Office of the Collector General. It was a period I look back on, now, with the fondness of those people who spent time as refugees in Beirut.
Happily, I was rescued, eventually, by something called the “Adult Ex”.
No, it wasn’t a part-time career in porn movies. It was an exam for the middle-management executive officer grade: so-called to distinguish it from the “Junior Ex” which you could do from school (with good Irish).
You had to be 21 for the “Adult” version: in which – to judge by my excruciating 10-minute oral – Irish did not count for much.
Now, suddenly, I had a career: one that, had I stuck with it, might eventually have involved a decent salary, my own office, and bench-marking. That was still the distant future, however. In the short-term, the promotion took me to Social Welfare and a section called “UB Decisions”.
The letters stood for “Unemployment Benefit”: this being where all the employment exchanges referred problem cases. But the letters were usually dropped in the shorthand version. And for a natural procrastinator such as I, this was a cruel joke. For the next several years, during which I was postponing serious consideration about what to do with my life, I had to pick up the phone every time it rang and announce cheerfully: “Decisions!”
The work of a deciding officer was not very important, except for those on the receiving end. When not wasting time answering TD’s letters and parliamentary questions – the bane of our lives – we were adjudicating on whether this student was “genuinely seeking work”, rather than getting tax-payers to fund his summer holidays. Or whether that double-claimant, now rumbled, should refund the overpayment at 50p a week for the next 10 years, or a pound.
Most of us were conscientious about it, balancing the demands of fiscal rectitude against the knowledge that – feckless students and fraudsters apart – we were dealing with society’s vulnerable.
There was one colleague of slightly Thatcherite leanings who, when you referred a claim to him, would unsheathe his “Disallowed” stamp, like a cowboy unbuttoning his holster. But I think this was just his little joke.
Claimants could appeal, after all, so disqualifications had to be well-grounded.
My speciality was troubled families, which did not usually involve disqualifying anyone, but was still contentious.
Typically, a distressed married woman would request direct payment of part of her husband’s dole, because he was drinking or gambling it. Whereupon, the exchange would ring the man in “Decisions”, who would rule, Solomon-like, that a letter of confirmation from “a respected third party” (i.e. the local parish priest or Garda Sgt) be sought before the necessary arrangements were made.
IN MY LAST YEARin the Department of Social Welfare, the big story concerned Martin Cahill, who around that time came to be referred to as "the man who denies he is the General".
Among other things, Ireland’s most famous (blue-collar) criminal was revealed to be claiming the dole: an embarrassment for all concerned, except him.
So it fell to one of my unfortunate colleagues to rubber-stamp his disallowance on suspicion of having undisclosed means. Naturally, Cahill appealed. And as part of his submission, he had my colleague dragged from his home one night and shot in both legs.
I learned of that event in Australia: scene of my initial escape attempt. But a 12-month working visa there passed too quickly. A year on, playing for time, I extended the career-break and headed for London: subsidising my infiltration of journalism (still at planning stage) on the building sites. I was there when communism collapsed. And, by the time I returned home again – lo! – Dublin also seemed to have turned from East Berlin into West.
Thus, I finally worked up the confidence to chance my arm in full-time journalism, knowing that if starvation struck, I could always have that chat with my old principal officer.
Ironically, it took about two years of freelancing before my income reached unemployment benefit levels (I couldn’t claim welfare, obviously).
But the day came when, five years on, I made my last ruling as a deciding officer, which was to tell the personnel department I wouldn’t be back. My principal officer had been vindicated. And I suspect that, for the Civil Service and I, it was a win-win situation.
