I thank you for allowing me to raise this matter, which is to do with the decision of the Department of Social Welfare not to pay unemployment assistance to two members of the Irish under-18 international soccer team during their participation in the European championships in Moscow recently. There is a certain obvious irony in my talking about this in the light of the last hour and a half's discussion. I am sorry I could not be here for it but I had to prepare something for this motion.
There was a major international success scored by an Irish team in recent weeks and the Irish media did not notice it very much either, so it is just not politicians who can be complained about. An Irish under-18 soccer team competed in the Soviet Union in the European championships and were outstandingly successful. They beat teams like Scotland and Portugal and eventually qualified for the semi-final where they were very honourably defeated by the Soviet Union, the host country, by two goals to one. By any standards, for any country that would be a creditable performance. For a country as small as this country where association football is a minority sport, it was an extremely impressive performance, a performance which one would have thought would have merited them not just the congratulations but the gratitude of this country. It would have merited congratulations, not just for the impressive way they carried the name of Ireland but for the achievement of the young people in itself and by themselves.
There was a problem associated with that team because of the way we still persist in dealing with this issue. The problem was that five members of that team had the misfortune to be unemployed, that is, we their elders and their betters had failed to organise a society which would guarantee them, the young, the less able and the more vulnerable jobs which would give them a decent living and a decent income. They qualified for unemployment assistance. They were unemployed; they are not professional footballers. The welcome they got when they came home, instead of the congratulations of all of us, was to be told that because they were out of the country for two weeks and therefore not available for work, the congratulations they got was the withholding of unemployment assistance for two weeks, which amounts to £28.90 per young person per week, or £57.80 for two weeks.
We have a quarter of a million people unemployed in this country. Why were these young people refused unemployment assistance? Because, they were told, they were not available for work. It is very easy for those of us who have £10,000, £15,000 or £20,000 a year to elaborate definitions of availability for work. The truth, of course, is that there are a quarter of a million people available for work in this country but that work is not available. Of that quarter of a million people, a large proportion — the numbers can be argued, probably 60,000 or 70,000 — are young people. Of those young people about a quarter receive no State assistance. Our two young successful people, keeping themselves busy, finding something useful to do with what otherwise would be a wasted life, were told that because they were not available for work in those weeks they were away in Moscow being a success, achieving something, they could not qualify for unemployment assistance. The implication, which I hope is not intended, is "How dare you be successful if you are unemployed?" or "If you are so successful, why have you not got a job?"
The narrow and extraordinary definition of availability for work implied in this decision is not just a question or a suggestion of controlling people who might be refusing to work but is operated in such a way that a necessary process of subjugation is required in order for people to qualify for unemployment assistance. It took an enormous compaign to get voluntary social work exempted from those rules. Unemployed nurses who wanted to help old people recently were told that if they did so they would be refused unemployment assistance. They were going to do it for nothing, I emphasise. They would be refused unemployment assistance because if they were doing this voluntary service they would not be available for work.
These young people with their enormous achievements are being told precisely the same. Because they were not here and managed to escape from the ghetto of unemployment through their own successes, our response is to tell them that they are not eligible for unemployment assistance. The vast sum of money — £28.90 a week — is best put in perspective by comparing it with something like the eating out guide in The Irish Times which happily suggests that £28 or £30 would be good value for a meal for two in any restaurant in Dublin. That is what we give these youngsters to live on for the week. Then we tell them that they cannot have it because they were doing something useful and were not available for work.
I do not know what motivates us to take decisions like this. I do not know what motivates us deep down to support that sort of practice. There is no legislative reason why it has to be like that because availability for work is a matter of practice, a matter of regulation and not a matter of law. In the days when unemployment was less people had to sign on two days a week and some people, when they were suspected of not being available for work or perhaps of having a job on the side, were required to sign on for five days a week. When unemployment developed into massive proportion it suddenly became necessary to sign on only one day a week and in Northern Ireland it is necessary to sign on only once a fortnight. There is obviously room for expansion, contraction and room for manoeuvre. One has to ask why do we have these definitions. The tragedy would be, of course, that this definition was convenient in keeping a large number of people from qualifying for benefit. I do not know whether it is true or not.
The Minister for Social Welfare recently addressed a conference on poverty and unemployment and The Cork Examiner of last Tuesday reported as follows:
"What do we hear from some of our ultra conservative politicians and commentators who go to bed at night with a full stomach and worrying only about when to trade in the year old car or the high rate of VAT on golf balls?", he asked.
The Minister criticised the widespread hostility among an influential powerful minority in Irish society to any welfare system which sought to provide any sort of decent standard of living.
The junior Minister in that Department is with us and in this specific case he cannot blame the other Government party or the trade unions or industry. This is a matter of administration and administrative practice. There are no other scapegoats to be identified. What we have in this country is a sort of fear of our young people which has been translated into a capacity to blame them for being unemployed and to blame them for even existing. We have an obsessiveness with fear, fiddle and fraud which runs through the entire welfare system and undermines the objectives of that system, which are to help and support and to sustain.
These two young people came from what must have been a lower income group background. For a youngster living at home to qualify for unemployment assistance in the first place the family income has to be relatively low. Therefore it is easy to conjecture that the deprivation of the admittedly miserly £30 could have resulted in as large a reduction in that family's income as 25 per cent. Two already marginally impoverished families were expected and required by our society to sustain a further 25 per cent reduction in that minimal lifestyle so that two of the children could be successful on their own behalf or on our behalf in an international sporting competition.
What the Minister, the Government and we as a society need to do is to restate in a fundamental fashion what we mean by availability for work. There is no point in saying, and I hope the Minister will not do it, that there are regulations to be observed or it is a complex or a difficult issue. The trouble is that it would be very simple to identify people who were not available for work if there were plenty of jobs available because one could identify the people who were actually offered work and did not take it. Then there would be no problem. The problem is when there is no work to offer people how do you determine whether they are available for work or not? The truth is, of course, that if work is not available it is particularly humiliating to tell people that they must be judged as being available for something which does not exist. Therefore the whole concept of availability for work must be abolished or restated. I would suggest simply that anybody in receipt of unemployment assistance who is offered a job which could be reasonably adjudicated as being relevant to their skills and qualifications and declines that offer would then be deemed to be not available for work. To do otherwise is to suggest to the unemployed that he is not allowed to do anything, to be anywhere, or to be anybody. He is a sub person whom we adjudicate on, whom we decide for and whom we keep in a proper place. It is a well established practice in this country in many areas of the public service that people who want leave of absence, in many cases with pay, for sporting achievements of one kind or another will be granted such leave of absence. Apparently similar provisions are not either available or acceptable for the unemployed.
The way young people are dealt with in issues like this indicates why somebody as eminent as Justin Keating of the Minister's own party could talk about the fury of the young. What they know is that what is said about them, the platitudes that are generated about them, and the realities of their own experiences conflict head on. For these two youngsters ever to be told that society recognises their worth or their contribution will seem to them to be nothing more than a fundamentally dishonest statement. They know that in the one specific area where society contributes something to them society's response to their achievements was to say: "No, you cannot have anything."
There is a certain irony in talking about these young people and in talking about what we as a society and as politicans attempt to do on their behalf. They arrived home at Dublin Airport a few hours after a certain eminent visitor left and, in the words of the gardaí, democracy was restored in this country. That extraordinary spectacle of politicans jostling each other to get into the queue to say goodbye to one man was replaced by the absence of any political figure to welcome home a team which, by any standards had been extremely successful. Once the youngsters got back to the unemployment exchange they knew that there was not really any welcome for them anyway.
It seems that these young people, along with the large mass of unemployed people, now know fairly clearly something many of us have suspected, that deep down the establishment reaction to young people is that they are frightened of them and wish they would all emigrate. The establishment reaction is that if we cannot give them jobs we must at least keep them under control. One way to control them is to keep them in subjection in the way we deal with them regarding unemployment assistance.
There is an extraordinary contrast between the silence about the humiliation of the urban unemployed, of which this is an extreme example, and the extraordinary and quite justifiable clamour that the major Government parties raised about the treatment of people being assessed for what is called "farmers' dole". They were quite right to raise that clamour, but there is an extraordinary contrast in the silence on this issue. Is that because our young people have failed to make their political clout known?
I would appeal to the Minister. Please do not give me a script prepared by the same civil service that is responsible for these rules. Please do not give me an explanation about why not. Please do not tell me that there are administrative problems. I know and this House knows that there is no such thing as an impossible administrative problem. I know and this House knows that there is no such thing as a problem that cannot be overcome. The solution is not to explain away the problem. The solution is to dispose of the problem, not just in the case of two young people who either for their good or ill fortune had enough prominence at least to have their case identified, but for the large number of people, and particularly for women, who are regular victims of this non-availability for work escape clause.
What I ask of the Minister is a response to the problem and not an explanation for the status quo. What I ask of the Minister is a procedure for the future which will enable our young people to get at least the pittance that we adjudicated as their entitlement without constant humiliation, a system of administering our utterly inadequate unemployment assistance scheme which will at least not further the humiliation of those whom we, their elders and their alleged betters, humiliate by our inadequacies and our inability to provide full employment. I would say in conclusion that to reorganise this small aspect of unemployment assistance would be a worthy objective of anybody who stands under the name of socialism.
