Joan Burton got the plum job of announcing last week that social-welfare recipients will see their 2015 Christmas bonus rise to 75 per cent of their weekly payment, up from the 25 per cent bonus they got last year – and a lot more welcome than what happened in 2009, when the Christmas bonus was cut completely.
“The bonus is not just a welcome assistance to retired people at a financially stressful time of year. It also helps a range of other vulnerable people, including lone parents, long-term jobseekers, carers and people with disabilities,” the Tánaiste said. The bonus will reward those who “deserve immense credit for ensuring that social solidarity remained intact throughout the crisis, when it fractured in other countries”.
With the bonus due to land in bank and post office accounts next week, The Irish Times went an Intreo office in Dublin to talk to people waiting for the money to drop.
The pensioner: ‘I’m going to spend it on my three grandchildren’
Olive Wilkinson, from Kilmainham in Dublin, always worked, apart from taking time out to raise her three daughters and her son. That was hands-on, she says. It cost her in the end, though, as she gets €225 a week as a contributory pension from the State. She should have got €230 a week, she says, but "I was one stamp short, so they take €5 off me a week." This weekly docking is Wilkinson's reward for the four children and the many jobs she had, including the one she did for 23 years before she retired, cleaning at the Irish Kennel Club headquarters in Harold's Cross.
Wilkinson (above), whose husband also gets a contributory pension, thinks she will get about €175 in her Christmas stocking. “I’m going to spend it on my three grandchildren,” she says, smiling. By 2016 her three granddaughters will be joined by another; she’s hoping for a boy. The whole family are still in Dublin; they’ll come around with their partners and children to have Christmas with their mam and dad.
Wilkinson is quite happy with her bonus. She is actually quite happy with the Taoiseach, too. "I'm very partial to Enda Kenny. I think that he's great, but I've always been a Fine Gael woman. Fair play to him. I think he is doing a very good job," says Wilkinson. She thinks the economy is on the up and the bonus is a generous response. Nobody will change her voting intentions, anyway. Of that she is certain.
The family on social welfare: ‘It’s another way of buying votes’
One mother from Drimnagh, who prefers not to be named, says the 75 per cent Christmas bonus is a cynical administrative exercise, “another way of buying votes”.
The whole family – mam, dad, a grandmother and a cherubic three-year-old – are here for jobseeking advice.
The family gets €340 a week in social-welfare benefits. Dad gets €188 and mam €125. He gets the cheques, though, she says, and he collects the money from the post office in Drimnagh. They also claim the fuel allowance, which is taken into account when the bonus is paid. They are not married. The bonus, she says, is precisely that: a bonus. “Of course it is. It is Christmas.”
Last year the family got a bonus of just 25 per cent of their weekly allowance, and they struggled terribly. “Last year I had to go to the St Vincent de Paul. I got a €60 voucher, which I spent in Dunnes.” But the cupboards were soon bare, and her family had to help out, as they always try to do.
She felt guilty about taking the voucher from the St Vincent de Paul, she says. “I thought about all the homeless people and I felt bad. That shouldn’t be happening.”
Her partner has upskilled and done courses, but he still can’t get a job. Now they are expecting another child, and she says they have not felt part of any economic uplift. “With this increase they think they’ll get the votes out of us. But I haven’t got a clue who I’ll be voting for now.”
She is happy, however, that she knows that Santa will come this year. Next week the bonus money will be sent to Santa, along with the week's grocery money. "We won't be eating next week, but at least we know that we can make Christmas happen."
The lone parent: ‘It will help, but it won’t go far’
This single mother, who also prefers not to give her name, is raising four boys – aged 14, 11, nine, and six months – in a corporation flat in Dolphin’s Barn, so the 75 per cent Christmas bonus can’t come soon enough.
She has a huge wish list of computer and video games from the boys, whose faith in Santa may be wavering or may have been killed off entirely but whose expectations for Christmas are as high as ever.
This is the first year she has received a social-welfare Christmas bonus, she says, as she was either at college or working in a nursery before her baby was born earlier this year. “It will help, but it won’t go far,” she says. “It will make a little dent in what you have to get, but that’s all.”
The bonus will indeed be spent “within the local economy”, as the Tánaiste said it was intended to be. Next week this mother is heading to Dunnes and to shops that sell second-hand computer games, to make a “little dent” in her own Christmas list. Santa will be coming whatever anyone believes.
The man on disability allowance: ‘I’m waiting all year to buy clothes’
Any bonus at Christmas will “pay a bill or help in some way”, says a man from Bluebell, in west Dublin. “It just makes it a bit easier. But only for December.” He was off to watch the Republic of Ireland’s women’s football team play Spain in Tallaght last Thursday, a rare trip out for the soccer fan.
Liffey Valley Shopping Centre will be the beneficiary of the bonus, he says, as he has been waiting all year to buy some new clothes. A geansaí and some trousers from Dunnes will lift his spirits. “You just give up after a while. But if you have a shilling you have a shilling.”
He’s going to his brother’s house for Christmas, but the family have had a no-presents rule for some time, so there will be no unwrapping to be done.
He is angry with the current administration and will be casting his vote elsewhere in next year’s general election. “It breaks my hearts to think that, if they do all get kicked out, they’ll all get big fat pensions. They get double the amount to cover their unreceipted expenses each year that I do in income. They haven’t a clue what’s going on, what the ordinary people are putting up with. They are just slaughtering the unfortunate.”
The pensioner: ‘They are only giving us back three-quarters of it’
Another pensioner is waiting for an Intreo officer to put up her number and invite her over to the desk, so that they can talk across the strengthened-glass partition.
She is a proud Inchicore woman, she says, and cannot be easily fooled by what she considers a sleight of hand.
“It was our money in the first place. And it is not even the full amount they took off us. They are only giving us back three-quarters of it,” she says. “Everyone had to cut back over the past few years. It meant food at the end of the day. It was devastating.”
Food will be bought this year with the bonus money, she says. She will probably spend it in her local Aldi. “I won’t be celebrating the money they are giving me, because it is mine already,” she says before her number flashes up on the screen and she heads off with her walking stick.
It is too early for Christmas cheer, it seems. It is still November, after all, and the bonus is not due until the first week of December.
