Last week's budget gave very small increases to people on social welfare, especially to the unemployed. So what else is new? Not, certainly, the lack of generosity. What's new, however, is the excuse. For the first time, the reason for keeping the poor was not an alleged lack of resources. This time, uniquely, no one bothered to pretend that we would be giving loads of money to the unemployed and their families if only we could. This time, there was a more or less explicit admission that being mean to the jobless is a matter of policy. The Government had the money, but decided not to give it to them.
This is not mere heartlessness, of course. It is, in the minds of Bertie Ahern, Charlie McCreevy and Mary Harney, a case of being cruel to be kind. The thinking is clear. There are loads of unfilled jobs. There are lots of people getting welfare who are well able to work but who prefer to live off hand-outs. If we give them a decent income from welfare, it will only encourage them to stay where they are. By giving them the smallest possible increases, and by making work attractive by means of a radical reform of the tax system, we will force them to get up off their backsides. This is not speculation on my part. It is, in essence, what various ministers were saying all last week. It is also, though the Government now denies it, the motivation behind Dermot Ahern's failed attempt to stop Christmas bonuses for those on supplementary welfare. There is a coherent strategy in which tax credits will be the carrot for low-paid workers and a welfare squeeze will be the stick. And it is probably a strategy that most taxpayers support, because it is based on assumptions that are allowed to go unquestioned.
Most of them, as it happens, are wrong. Firstly, and most obviously, many people living on unemployment benefits are not unemployed. They are the children of the unemployed. A third of Irish children are living in homes with incomes below the poverty line. Most of them are dependent on social welfare. They don't have a choice about whether to take a job or how to improve their lot. Hurting them doesn't make them decide not to be poor. It just makes their chances of a decent life in the future even bleaker.
THE next assumption is that there are vast numbers of chancers drawing the dole. Time and again, we are told to look at the difference between the Live Register figures for unemployment and those contained in the allegedly more accurate Labour Force Survey. There is a long and tedious argument to be made about this, but three simple facts are worth noting. Firstly, we never heard a word about the discrepancy between these different measures throughout the 1980s. Why? Because in those days, the Live Register figures were substantially (ital) lower than the LFS figures. Oddly, the same people who now insist that the LFS figures show that unemployment is greatly exaggerated didn't tell us that by the same criterion it was then greatly underestimated.
Secondly, neither measure counts the 40,000-odd people who are in various temporary employment schemes. And thirdly, whatever measure is used - the live register, the LFS, the National Household Survey - there is still a massive problem of long-term unemployment in Ireland.
At best, there are 86,000 people in this category, at worst 96,000. The only purpose served by all the haggling over how they are counted is to distract attention from the appalling persistence of the problem in a booming economy.
There is one other assumption that underpins the notion that these people need to be squeezed. It is that there are loads of schemes in place to retrain the long-term unemployed and turn them into productive workers with decent jobs.
People in work have a vague notion that out there somewhere there are opportunities for the long-term unemployed to get the skills they need. Since they are not taking those opportunities, they must be layabouts who don't really want to work.
It's not necessarily a crazy assumption. The State is spending about £400 million a year on schemes for the long-term unemployed and the European Social Fund chips in another £22 million.
But this money is being spent extremely badly. Before embarking on a policy of trying to kick the unemployed into work, the Government should first have asked whether it is actually possible for someone who has been out of work for a long time to acquire the necessary skills. The answer can be found in an extraordinarily damning report published last month by the ESF Evaluation Unit. Its major conclusion is that "the long term unemployed are currently not receiving the education and training which would significantly enhance their employment opportunities".
There were, in 1997, 57,000 long-term unemployed people on various Government schemes. According to the report, a mere 3,500 of these were on "programmes which would significantly enhance skills and qualifications". In other words, most of these people were no better off in terms of useful skills at the end of a scheme than they were at the beginning. They were not one iota nearer to being prepared for a decent, sustainable job. The truth is that the unemployed are still being treated as unemployable. They are stuck in relatively meaningless artificial jobs that are more about keeping them off the streets and off the Live Register than about helping them out of poverty and welfare and into work. In his sane, eloquent and angry new book The Bitter Word: Ireland's Jobs Famine and its Aftermath, Mike Allen cites the example of workers on a scheme in Donegal being sent out with saws and slash-hooks to cut hedges while council employees were being sent out to do the same job with modern equipment, reminding the scheme workers "yet again how little their time and labour were valued".
The ESF report is utterly scathing about all of this. It finds "practically no evidence of mainstream integrated and coherent provision which would deliver on the key components necessary to reintegrate the long-term unemployed". It calls the apparent policy of making schemes that actually help people into jobs less attractive in terms of pay and conditions "perverse".
It points out that the number of long-term unemployed people with no educational qualifications who actually complete a scheme that gives them some is about 700 a year: less than 1 per cent of the total. Until this outrageous failure is addressed, all the talk about "encouraging" people from welfare into work is a big lie. Unless, of course, the work the Government has in mind is the low-grade, dead-end, utterly unskilled and entirely exploitative work that doesn't actually get people out of poverty at all. If that is the case, if the agenda is not to end poverty but to provide small businesses with exploitable human resources, then we should be told. If it is not, then we should stop punishing people for being unemployed when we are doing nothing to help them move into a decent job.