OPINION:Being unemployed was not a period of my life that I look back on with warm nostalgia, writes BRENDAN LANDER.
I HAVE a confession to make. Perhaps it’s not something I should dare to admit in these times of hair-shirt budgets, hard times and penury but, what the heck, I’m going to fess up anyway.
I used to sometimes daydream that I was rich. In my daydream I did not become rich by inventing a more efficient alternative to the wheel or the worldwide web, or by discovering gold or oil in my back garden, or by writing a great international best-seller. No. In my dream I got rich the old-fashioned way – I won a million euro on the lottery.
I daydreamed that I won the million, put it in the bank and lived out the rest of my life on the interest. I even checked the interest rates in various saving accounts so that I could get the best return on my deposit. In my dream I found the most appropriate account, wandered down to the bank and deposited the cheque.
My business concluded, I rented a movie, bought a six-pack of Guinness, came home, ordered pizza and kicked back and relaxed. I was on the pig’s back.
Then one evening a few weeks ago I turned on the telly to watch the news and this fellow came on and said he was taking a pay cut and from then on he’d have to scrape by on less than two million euro a year.
Well, my dream was shattered.
I realised that I’d been looking at the world through rose-tinted glasses. What sort of an eejit must I have been, I wondered, to think that I could possibly get by for the rest of my natural life on the interest on a mere million? I knew then that my daydream lacked grandeur and ambition and was entirely inappropriate for this best of all possible worlds.
So I turned off the news and tried to daydream that I won a billion euro. But I couldn’t get my head around the notion of that amount of money. I know, I know, I should be more sophisticated in this day and age when the newspapers are full of talk of millions of euro shifting from Billy to Jack and back again at the lift of a well-tailored eyebrow. I should be au fait with the concept of being blase about a billion euro but I’m not. It just doesn’t seem real to me.
Then I tried to get back into my original daydream but I couldn’t do that either. I felt like a bum or a ne’er-do-well. Who but a man of inferior disposition would indulge in such menial ambition? So I decided to give up the daydreaming altogether. I turned the news back on and I saw yet another batch of workers walking out through a factory gate for the last time, to join the army of people parading to the dole offices. A powerful sense of deja vu overwhelmed me.
As a single young man back in the 1980s I spent two years on the dole. This is not a period of my life that I look back on with warm nostalgia. Life on the dole is awful. It’s grim, relentless and soul-destroying.
It’s okay for the first few months. You believe in yourself and you’re relatively confident that you’ll find another job. You fill in application forms and send them off and hope for a prompt reply.
You have some savings, you get a bit of tax back and the time off is a novelty. You can get up out of bed at whatever time you like. You can watch a movie in the afternoon and in the evening enjoy the company of your friends down in the local. For a brief period, once you put the worry about your future out of mind, it’s a bit of a holiday.
But after a while the job applications remain unanswered and your sense of hope is less assured. Your savings dwindle and the tax rebates are spent and you can’t afford the movies or the nights in the pub. Your friends are good to you and they spot you a few pints no problem and you avail of their generosity at the start but then it becomes embarrassing and you stop taking advantage.
The weight of life intensifies. You have hardly any money and so you don’t socialise as much as you used to. You can’t buy new clothes. You can’t go on a holiday. You can’t ask someone out on a date because you could barely afford the bus fare.
The long days, which used to hold such promise, stretch out like an eternity ahead of you and you wonder how you’ll fill the hours. Sometimes you wonder how much longer you’ll be able to endure them.
You spend more and more time inside yourself. Your self-esteem gradually diminishes. After about 18 months of unemployment I’m sure I was clinically depressed. I was tired, sluggish and felt disconnected from society.
Whereas once I’d looked at life with bonhomie and enthusiasm, now I woke up every day and faced an exponentially increasing sense of despair. I remember days when I didn’t have the price of a small carton of milk and I didn’t have the wherewithal to ask somebody for it.
I remember nights that I spent in my bed-sit room drinking black tea and tasting defeat, my potential wasting away. I was a vital, intelligent, decent young man stuck in a black hole of hopelessness. Once, a man I barely knew gave me 20 quid. He was going out with a woman who lived in the same building as me and I only knew him to say hello to.
He knew I wasn’t working and one day he had a big win on the horses and I met him on the stairs and he gave me 20 quid. That would be the equivalent of 50 or 60 euro nowadays.
I went out and bought a bottle of Beaujolais 1986 (I’ll never forget it) and the makings of a chilli and I ate my dinner like a prince. That night I went to the local, met the lads and bought my own drinks like a normal person.
The kindness of that man on that day gave me the strength to keep on going for another couple of months and I’ll never forget him for it. His name was Roy.
There’s a facial expression that goes with being one of the long-term unemployed. I first saw it when I was out walking in Saint Anne’s Park and I rounded a corner and bumped into my friend Terry, who was also on the dole.
He was obviously down in the dumps. Our meeting took him by surprise and he had his guard down. His eyes were wide with consternation and when I looked into them I saw into his soul and beheld a vast pool of sheer misery. I identified his plight immediately and I realised that sometimes I wore that expression on my face. I hoped to Christ that my mother never caught me unawares and perceived the depths of abjection to which her son had sunk. This is the life that many of our young men and women are now facing into. We must rally round them. Back in the 1980s we were cast on the dole and promptly abandoned. We were made to feel as if it was our fault that we were out of work. We were frequently required to prove that we were looking for employment and there were inspectors who followed us around if they suspected we were doing odd jobs.
We know now that at the same time prosperous people were shifting vast sums of money into off-shore accounts to avoid tax. Yet the unemployed were the ones made to feel that we were holding the country to ransom. We as a society should work to ensure that this does not happen again. We must cherish these young (and not-so-young) men and women. They’ll need care and counselling, training and up-skilling. They’ll need love and understanding – and the odd 50 quid to go out and enjoy themselves and put their troubles out of mind for a day or two.
Ireland stands at a crossroads. How we treat our poor and unemployed will determine the nature of our country for the foreseeable future. We have a stark and simple choice to make.
Will we continue as a small-minded, dysfunctional, cynical nation that casually casts our people across the waters of the world? Or will we rediscover our sense of community, embrace all the children of the nation equally and try to make this country of ours a better place for all of us?
Brendan Landers is a freelance writer and novelist