State backs welfare guide but not equal rights

THE Government has been accused of hypocrisy over its backing for a new guide to the social welfare system just weeks after it campaigned against equal rights for agency workers.

The Department of Social and Family Affairs yesterday launched A Short Guide to the Irish Social Welfare System published by the Congress Centres Network in five languages; English, Polish, Lithuanian, Latvian and Russian.

The booklet outlines the payments and entitlements available within the social welfare system, explains how they can be accessed and gives advice for how people should act in various situations such as unemployment and ill-health.

There are plans to bring it out in a further 10 languages if the existing editions prove successful.

However, the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, under whose umbrella CCN produced the guide, raised a number of ways in which the Government was failing foreigners and the double standards in its approach to their rights.

It pointed out the document had come four years late as it should have been in place in 2004 when the borders were opened up to the accession states.

That was despite the fact the trade union movement had been pushing regularly for such a document repeatedly during those four years.

However, it was most critical of the clear dichotomy of one department of the Government, Social and Family Affairs, trying to promote rights for foreigners when just last month another department, Enterprise Trade and Employment, actively campaigned against equal rights for agency workers, the bulk of whom are non-nationals.

The Portuguese Presidency of the European Parliament tried to introduce the Temporary Agency Workers Directive, but Ireland continued to be one of a small handful of countries who blocked its implementation.

ICTU general secretary David Begg pointed to the upcoming case being taken by the Irish Hotels Federation which threatened to undermine the entitlements of workers, mainly migrant, in Irish hotels.

The IHF and Vaughan Lodge, a small hotel in Lahinch, are challenging the constitutionality of the fixing of a statutory minimum wage for approximately 25,000 workers in hotels outside Dublin, Dún Laoghaire and Cork city. That case will be before the courts on February 5.