A NEW campaign will attempt to defend the rights of people with disabilities and lone parents to access community employment schemes.
About 5,000 people with disabilities and 5,000 lone parents are community employment workers, who provide key services such as childcare, elderly care, youth work and drug rehabilitation, according to the trade union Siptu, which is behind the campaign, alongside a number of non-governmental organisations.
The review group led by economist Colm McCarthy recommended that welfare payments to these groups on the schemes should be stopped as they already receive a welfare payment.
The cut would save about €100 million per year and Department of Finance officials have already indicated that withdrawal of the payments is under consideration as a cost-cutting measure ahead of the December budget, the union said.
Several groups, including Siptu, Mental Health Ireland, Inclusion Ireland, the Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed and the lone parents group Open, have joined together to form a campaign to oppose any cutbacks.
“This proposal raises a very straightforward question: does this Government want lone parents and people with disabilities to access employment and training or not? Or will we see yet another budget where the already meagre incomes of low-paid workers will be cut again?” said Siptu organiser Paul Hansard.
“Siptu, Open and Mental Health Ireland are calling on Minister for Social Protection Eamon Ó Cuív to ensure that lone parents and people with disabilities are supported in their efforts to access training and employment through community employment.”
Anne Taft, a community employment worker and lone parent, said her scheme had given her the chance to work and train in elder care and to make a real contribution.
“It would simply be financially impossible for me to work in community employment without the support of welfare payments,” she said.
Frances Byrne of Open said official statistics show that lone parents are the poorest families and have already been hit by deep cuts to their social welfare payments in the last three budgets and it is vital that these families are protected in the 2011 budget.
“Any cut to the one-parent family payment for those on community employment will mean that fewer and fewer lone parents will be able to move from welfare to work, thus consigning our families to worsening poverty and deprivation,” said Ms Byrne.