Very well. In recent weeks, with a certain irony I have heard a lot of people rush to nail their pluralist credentials to the mast. I would invite all of those people to think through their pluralism, to the country's largest excluded minority. I use the word carefully because women are actually a majority in our society and therefore do not fall under the category of excluded minorities.
We should begin to recognise our unemployed for what they are: a large homogenous minority, invisible to a considerable extent, sharing a common experience of pain and humilitation of a variety of kinds. I can quote from this evening's Evening Press. This is a report of a lecture given by Dr. Declan McLoughlin of the James Connolly Memorial Hospital in Blanchardstown. He said that the long term unemployed complained of increasing anxiety, depression, insomnia and lack of confidence. He also said that the mental and physical effects of unemployment on such a young population would wreak havoc in the community if the issue were not addressed. He listed the various symptoms and consequences of unemployment for its victims.
All surveys show that the majority of unemployed people want a job and think that unemployment is a bad experience. However, there comes a point when people can no longer sustain their motivation in the face of continual rejection, heightened awareness of their own shortcomings, disillusion with job-finding services, belief that all options have been conveyed and the knowledge that jobs are scarce anyway. I quote that because it is one of the regrettable and painful facts about unemployment that many people subscribe to quite extraordinary prejudices about the unemployed, and not only people who are uninformed. John Blackwell, in a background paper to the report to the Commission on Social Welfare, on the alleged effect of unemployment compensation and the work incentive, showed that there is no conclusive evidence. In a survey on the literature he quotes the so-called experts, and this is precisely what he says: "The literature assumes, in general, that unemployment brings with it a leisure component which yields positive satisfaction." These are the so-called experts surveyed by an expert and an expert who was not particularly sympathetic to those experts.
We start off considering the perception of the unemployed with that extraordinary assertion of the experts that there is something positive about unemployment; there is a sort of a leisure contribution — the free time thing. The first thing to be said is that all of the human statistics as distinct from the economic analysis of unemployment, say the opposite: unemployed people do not find it positive, beneficial, helpful or anything like that. They find it quite the opposite and, in the words of the doctor, depressing and heartbreaking, etc. That is the first thing that needs to be said about the unemployed.
The second thing to remember is that one of the reasons we can have these contradictory and, indeed, untrue statements about the unemployed is because they are effectively, largely and geographically invisible. If we had, as I have said before, a racial minority which was concentrated overwhelmingly in certain areas of our cities, with poor housing imposed upon it, together with overcrowded, underfunded schools, a diminished if not destroyed physical environment, and increasing problems of substance abuse among its young people, large sections of our liberal establishment would scream "discrimination". They would scream "this is wrong, this is a minority that has been victimised", but when it happens to our unemployed it apparently becomes an issue which can be ignored. It has none of the "sexy" qualities of many of the other areas of minority rights and yet the unemployed are the largest minority in our society. We have many different minorities and many people complain about them. Within that minority of the unemployed, for instance, I will briefly refer to one minority and they are the travelling community.
The travelling community all round the country are required to sign on at 11.30 a.m. on a Thursday morning. If our Jewish countrymen or our Muslim countrymen or our black fellow countrymen or Church of Ireland fellow brethern were required to sign on at a particular time at every labour exchange in the country, every single member of the liberal Establishment would scream blue murder and yet the travelling community are subject to this. You can go to any labour exchange anywhere and pick out the travelling community; they are the people who sign on at 11.30 a.m. The joke is that this Government, and successive Governments, will deny that, and have done so. They will deny it by saying we do not pick on the travelling community, it applies to persons of no fixed abode. The joke of that is, of course, that the official rules of the Department of Social Welfare say you cannot get unemployment assistance if you do not have an address, so therefore, it does not apply to persons of no fixed abode. The truth is that it applies to the travellers and I think Senator O'Toole when he speaks will elaborate somewhat on that.
There is an increasing recognition of the devastation of the unemployed. It is recognised by the variety of schemes which the present Minister to his credit has introduced: schemes on educational opportunities, on part-time work, on participation and voluntary work. All of these are welcome but they are a little like the South African Government recognising the oppression of apartheid and making concessions on the margins of apartheid to make it more palatable. There are perhaps 1,000 people out of the 220,000 unemployed involved in education schemes. I do not know how many are involved in voluntary work. It is still a very small number out of 220,000 people of whom, according to the Department's own figures, perhaps 135,000 are long term unemployed. These schemes are there for most of those people but they do not seem to get through to them and it is worth wondering why.
These are indications that we are doing something to these people; these are recognitions that these people suffer. The doctor I quoted said that they suffer; there is considerable evidence on the subject from some other people and every community group will tell you that these people suffer from unemployment. It is not just the temporary loss of a job; it is the long term effects of exclusion from the job market. You have to look carefully at what it means to be unemployed and at what we do to the unemployed. The statistic of unemployment is thrown around as if it were the statistic of inflation — a thing that goes up and down. Eminent economic commentators do this. They say that inflation is 4 per cent, unemployment is 17 per cent; two different statistics. One is a measure of the price of goods and services; the other is a measure of human degradation. They should not be treated as if they were interchangeable calculations in an economic matrix. They are two totally different quantities; one refers to people, the other to things.
One of the popular perceptions of the unemployed is of a large-scale willingness or tendency to fiddle at the first possible opportunity. Sadly this is prejudice that is widely fostered by certain sections of the media with an enthusiasm that goes far beyond the factual evidence. The best evidence I have is from the summary of the report of the Craig Gardner Management consultant's review on payment systems issued by the Department. On page 10 of that report, the Craig Gardner report summary which refers to Dublin, says:
In terms of monetary expenditure, these figures suggest that about 1 per cent of unemployment payments and something like .8 per cent of disability benefit payments are claimed fraudulently.
We are talking about figures as low as 1.5 per cent. I do not think that that represents unemployment schemes being abused on a grand scale. I do not think it represents anything other than the minuscule tail of abuse in a system which apparently has succeeded in squeezing out most of the abuse. The problem is what else it has squeezed out in the process of dealing with abuse.
To understand what is squeezed out of people in this system you have to understand what is done to people. To qualify for unemployment assistance which is the one which I am most concerned about because it affects the long term unemployed, you have to do a number of things. The first is that you have to be actively seeking employment and the second is that you must be available for work. They all sound like laudable options except that when people's unemployment period stretches on for two months, four months and six months you still say that people must be actively seeking employment, must be actively available for work.
Actively seeking employment means proving you are looking for work. That would be very fine in a society where there was plenty of work available or where there was a prospect of plenty of work being available but neither is the case. There are 221,000 people unemployed in this country. The best forecasts for the next ten years will not push us much below 150,000 and that is being extremely optimistic. It could stay as high as 170,000 or 180,000 even with the most optimistic forecasts. You are talking about a large pool of people with an inadequate supply of jobs being told that they must be actively seeking employment.
Those who run the system, through no fault of their own are forced into impossible dilemmas which cause impossible pain for the unemployed by forcing unfortunate wretches to go through the sham of looking of jobs when everybody knows that there is not a single job available. I met a personnel manager in a factory in County Galway recently, who said he was sick and tired of having to write letters to people telling them that he had no work. He was only doing it because the unfortunate person who contacted him would be told that he could not qualify for unemployment assistance if he did not have evidence that he had actively sought work. This man had no jobs available. I know of many instances of foremen on building sites with big signs outside saying "no vacancies", still having to go through the ritual of telling men that they have no work because the men were told that if they did not go and look for work they would be disqualified. It is a humiliating, degrading ritual and there is a simple alternative to it.
The second requirement, of course, is that you must be available for work. This is the one which has produced the education scheme, the part-time work scheme, the voluntary work scheme. They are all very well but the one thing to remember in all of these is that for an unemployed person to do anything they must get approval. To go on voluntary work they must get approval, to go on an education scheme they must get approval. They must get approval to do a whole lot of things. Though it is well-intentioned and a good idea, as far as it goes, it still conveys the impression of a suspect minority needing to be controlled, needing to be kept under the watchful eye of those of us who will make sure that they do not stray from the straight and narrow.
If it were done to a racial minority or to a religious minority we would be up in arms in outrage. Yet, it is done to our largest excluded minority consistently by the system, not by the individuals who run the system, but by the system itself. It is the system that is wrong; it is the system that hurts people. The "availability for work" provision has at times been loosened but essentially you must be either idle or doing something the system approves of or else you are not available to work. It is meaningless in a society where work is not available. It explains nothing and it means nothing in a society where work is not available.
I would like to explain to the Minister a simple alternative to all of this. The simple alternative is as follows. If one wants to know whether people are actively seeking employment, if one wants to know whether people are available for work, offer them a job. Offer them a job that has pay and conditions similar to those which a trade union in the area would agree with. If somebody says, "No, I do not want that job," then you have proved that they are not available for work and you can say, "These people are not really looking for work because when they were offered a job they would not take it." So why do we not do that? Because there are not jobs available. We go through this meaningless ritual of degradation and humiliation to do something that is impossible. There are no jobs available for all these people. I do not know why it is not so self-evidently correct as to be demanding and screaming out for a change. We put a quarter of a million people through a ritual like this to search for jobs, to prove they are looking for jobs, for something that does not exist. It is a dreadful system. It is a hangover from a totally different world.
We have gone through extremes of this. I produced a report two years ago on the job search scheme in which I surveyed all the centres for the unemployed around the country asking them what they thought of the job search scheme and they all though very little of it. The Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice have produced a report in which they concluded it was simply a scheme to harass the unemployed, to put pressure on the unemployed, to keep them under control. Lots of people have come to the same conclusion about that scheme and it is now, thankfully, fading out. The best estimates of the Department of Social Welfare show that 10,000 full-time jobs were filled through the job search scheme, not because of it, but through it. The real survey would have to be done to see how many of them would have been filled anyway, even if there were no job search scheme. That was a ritual which further stigmatised the unemployed and tied them down.
Adding to our insistence on availability for work — this non-existent work — are the conditions attached to the social employment scheme. The problem always is that a whole lot of well-intentioned things are done — for example, the education programme, the part-time work scheme, the social employment scheme. They are done with the best intentions in the world. But it becomes another badge of humiliation. Anybody who saw those angry people marching up and down outside the gate last week would have to wonder why it is something that actually gives people work could be so hurtful. The reason is, first, that many of them feel they are shanghaied into doing something that pays them very little more than they get on the dole; but they have to do it or else their unemployment assistance will be cut off. It pays somewhat more, not a lot more. But they have a problem. If they look for the family income supplement they will be told they cannot have it because they are not working. Therefore, they have a financial crisis and they go to the community welfare officer who tells them, "You cannot have it because you are working."
That is the story of the people outside the gate of this House this week. One side of the system tells them, "You cannot have our benefit because you are not working" and the other side tells them, "You cannot have our benefit because you are working." On top of that, they are told that because they are on the social employment scheme they are not eligible for the Christmas bonus that people on the dole get.
Talk about a scheme that is full of good intentions. It is so tied up with a perception of the unemployed that they have to be squeezed in on every side. The problem is a central perception that these people cannot be trusted with their own lives, incomes and so on. It is a classic perception of a society of a suspect minority, a minority which cannot be trusted not to run away with, metaphorically speaking, the family silver, that is, the unemployment assistance; a suspect minority which cannot be trusted to look for work under its own initiative, which apparently we presume will not work unless it is coerced to work. This is a classic majority perception of a racial or religious minority, a classic one from Northern Ireland, the US, wherever you like to go.
A classic perception by the majority of the minority is that they will not work because they do not want to work, not because there is no work available. Out of all that comes this increasingly invisible homogenous non-thought about a minority. It is time we thought about the unemployed instead of talking about unemployment.
I would like to suggest to this House a succession of proposals. I want to go through each of them with some thought at this stage. They are the proposals contained in the motion. Each of them deserves to be elaborated upon. The first of these is the necessity for a substantial increase in the rate of payments. There are two reasons for this. One is the sheer justice of the case which is that the money that is available currently is inadequate. The figures at this stage should be £61 for a single person and £100 for a single person with an adult dependant. The current rates for unemployment assistance for the long term unemployed are £52 for a single person and £31 for an adult dependant, which adds up to £83. We are talking not about large incomes but minimum incomes and we are still a long way away from the recommendation of the Commission on Social Welfare. It is important to appreciate that those figures understate the recommendation, because the Commission on Social Welfare recommend that child dependant rates for unemployed people should be big enough to support the children, which means that a quite dramatic increase in the child dependant figures is also necessary. That is the first primary requirement. Let us get away from the side arguments that this would represent a disincentive to work. The overwhelming evidence is that people want to work. The only people who believe that the unemployed do not want to work are econmists who never talk to the unemployed, who look at statistical evidence, who attempt to generate cause and effect relationships where none exist.
Anybody who has spoken to unemployed people will know the lengths to which they will go to work. I knew a man who actually hitched 30 miles every morning and evening in order to do a social employment scheme just because he wanted to do something. He ended up, like everybody else, being degraded, humiliated and hurt by that. The list of people is endless. The Department's own statistics are endless and prove beyond doubt that people do not abuse social welfare. Social welfare abuses people. It is not the fault of the Department's officials. It is the system and its perception that has degraded people and humiliated them.
With regard to the signing on requirment, I am not sure what it is supposed to prove. When we had no information technology, when we had all the other problems of cumbersome paperwork, etc., there may have been a reason. One only needs to talk to somebody about the shock of the first visit to the labour exchange. I have a friend, a journalist, who was put temporarily out of work by an industrial dispute which did not affect him. He went down to his local labour exchange to sign on. He is a confident, articulate, self-assured person who knows his rights. He came out of it after one visit with a large lump of his dignity taken from him, not by the officials, but by the system. One visit by an educated, articulate, confident man — a man who had a job as a by-line specialist correspondent in a national newspaper — to the labour exchange and he felt that he had lost a large portion of his dignity. For people who do this week after week for a large part of their adult lives it is guaranteed to destroy their dignity. It cannot be any other way.
I have described at length the actively seeking employment requirement. In a society where there was a shortage of labour and a surplus of jobs, it may have been an idea but in a society where work is scarce and people without work are numerous, to send one quarter of a million people chasing jobs around the country is an exercise in collective humiliation of a minority. It should end. If there is a need for control then it is up to those who administer the system. Successive Governments have looked at this. It is not the fault of any particular Government. It is up to them to devise an alternative system. For anybody who has been on the dole for six months, for whom FÁS, the Department of Social Welfare and all the other schemes have failed to provide anything, can we at least say after six months "Yes, we have failed you. We cannot give you a job, we cannot offer you the hope of a job, we cannot offer you anything. All we can do is give you a few miserable bob to keep you away from total humiliation." Let us drop this requirement to go seeking work on people who have been humiliated over weeks and months and, in some cases, years — drop it completely. Similarly, with the whole question of non-availability for work: for the long term unemployed it is a meaningless phrase. To suggest that people have to prove their idleness or have to have their non-idleness approved of by the system is, again, to add to their humiliation and degradation.
The issue is not simply modification to the system; it is an end to the system, because what the system has done is to create a stigmatised minority of about a quarter of a million people and, with their dependants and children, at least a half a million people in our society. It has created it, stigmatised it, put labels around it of "dosser", "fiddler", etc., and in the process has given them not enough money, but an excess of pain and suffering, and has achieved no purpose either for the Exchequer, for the unemployed or for the labour market.
May I say, in conclusion, that if the argument is to be made that the real solution to unemployment is the creation of jobs, I would be the first to stand up and cheer. I remind the House that the best forecasts suggest that we will have at least 150,000 people unemployed by the year 2000 and it will probably be closer to 175,000 or 180,000 or maybe even 200,000 depending on what happens. Those 200,000 people are a homogeneous, coherent minority — excluded, invisible and unheard. They do not appear on television, they do not have anything. There are more people unemployed than go on continental holidays; yet, we do not hear about them the way we do about continental holidays. There are more people unemployed than buy expensive clothes in Grafton Street, and yet we have a television programme every week about expensive clothes in Grafton Street. We make them invisible and, once made invisible, we humiliate them by our assumptions, by our systems and by the continuing presumption of their unworthiness of our support. I suggest to this House that modifications and tinkering at the margins of the system will not do. It is the system which destroys them, it is the system which must be changed and it is with that in view that I move the motion.
