Councillor: ‘Foreigners will collapse social welfare system’

An outspoken Monaghan county councillor has blasted foreign nationals who claim social welfare benefits, saying they will make the system collapse.

Seamus Treanor, 64, an Independent who topped the poll in his constituency in 2009, has appeared on Newstalk and Northern Sound radio over the past two days. He claimed 40% of the social welfare budget goes to foreign people.

The Department of Social Protection denied this, saying there is no breakdown by nationality of who claims what from the social welfare pool, which distributes about €21bn via 50 different schemes.

The department said it would take an extraordinary amount of work to find out what the true figures are.

The Live Register is the only way of gauging how many non-Irish people are claiming one particular social welfare benefit, jobseeker’s allowance.

According to January figures, of 439,589 people on the Register, 78,151 were non-Irish — less than 20%.

Of that, 17,827 are from Britain, 42,831 are from the EU accession states (Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, etc), 3,648 are from pre-enlargement EU countries and a further 13,000 are from “other countries”.

Mr Treanor was unrepentant and blamed Ireland’s unemployment rates on the huge numbers of economic migrants who came here in the boom times.

“These people are taking money from my dole office, and me and my grandchildren will end up paying for this down the line,” he said.

“There is a housing estate here in Monaghan town with 120 units where just 18 English-speaking families are left.

“We have a school where 60% of the children aren’t Irish. This country saw the biggest mass movement of people in recent times when we opened our borders to the European accession states.”

In a letter to a local paper in 2010, Mr Treanor wrote: “The richest countries in Europe, France and Germany put a 10-year moratorium on the free movement of Eastern Europeans into their countries. Pity our government of the day didn’t have the same foresight.”

His comments come in the wake of the “Magda” controversy. Although Mr Treanor accepted the article had been mistranslated, he said he knew “hundreds of Magdas” in his constituency.