True effect of austerity

While Michael Noonan, the finance minister, was getting plaudits from EU peers in the ungainly pink granite building off Schuman, down the road the true cost of Ireland’s austerity measures was being spelled out to MEPs by Michael McCabe of Independent Living.

Spouses of disabled people are having to give up tax-paying jobs due to the Government cutting the hours of their assistants.

But we appear to have come up with a novel way of playing down the effects — Eurostat’s latest “at risk of poverty or social exclusion index for 2010” has gaps where Ireland’s figures should be. The only clue is for 2009, when just over a quarter of the population fulfilled at least one of the three criteria.

But which, we don’t know.

Single parents commissioned their own research from TCD and the Vincentian Partnership for Social Justice that ranks Ireland as the fourth most socially unjust country in the developed world, with lone parents the most at risk.

Joan Burton, the social protection minister, may fill in gaps when she visits Brussels this week to speak on “Ireland’s Future in a Changing Europe”.