Landlord rent supplement windfall another scandal waiting to explode

THE Comptroller and Auditor General has warned that the rent supplement scheme is being ripped off by fraudsters.

He cited one instance in which an asylum seeker, who was working illegally, claimed rent supplement and various other benefits totalling €85,000 over four years.

This is grossly unfair not only to taxpayers, but also to legitimate asylum seekers, because it will inevitably fuel a kind of public uneasiness that leads to racism. The Government has been giving out the money without proper checks or balances being enforced by the departments involved.

The allowance was introduced as a safety net, but the cheats are rarely prosecuted, which means that the system is an open invitation for abuse. It would be grossly wrong to think that a few foreign fraudsters are the main beneficiaries of the process.

The Government has been handing landlords windfall gains, according to the comptroller. Who are those landlords?

Are they some of the same people associated with the construction industry who have had such close ties to Fianna Fáil over the years?

Don’t be surprised if this fiasco becomes the subject of another great scandal down the road. In five years the State has paid out over €1,636 million in rent supplements. The annual figure has jumped from €151m to €369m.

When charges for rented property were going up in 2000 and 2001, the rent allowances paid by the Government increased in line with the soaring rates, but when these fell by 10% in the next two years, there was no drop in what the state paid. The State was, in effect, artificially inflating rents throughout the country.

Rent supplements are being used as an artificial source of inflation, as over 80% of those supplements are paid at the upper level. The system has been designed supposedly to help the poor, and it does to an extent, but the main beneficiaries are the greedy rich.

Is this by design, or the result of incompetence and indifference? The way the State introduced the childcare supplement in the last budget seemed to suggest that the implications had not been properly thought out. It smacks of the way the latest round of decentralisation was announced in the 2003 budget. It would seem that each branch of Government is unaware of what the other is doing. Moreover, they seem to be utterly indifferent to the cost of the whole thing. The Department of Social and Family Affairs suggested the new childcare supplement could cost as much as €30m in 2007. Nobody seemed to take into account that parents with children living abroad would be entitled to the payment of €1,000 for each child under six.

The Minister for Children, Brian Lenihan, criticised the Irish Examiner for publishing the figure given by the Department of Social and Family Affairs. He suggested that it was unlikely to exceed €11m for 2007, while the Taoiseach said the figure would not even exceed €1.5m this year.

The discrepancy between the various figures, even though they do not all relate to the same year, is simply mind-blowing. If we are to believe the consensus of a number of departments, the cost will actually run somewhere between €10m and €11m. That would seem to suggest that the people in the Department of Social and Family Affairs — who put the figure at almost three times that amount — don’t know what is going on. Of course, in time we could find out that none of them knew what they were talking about.

Yet these civil servants enjoy 40% more pay than their counterparts in the private sector, according to the National Employment Survey published this week by the Central Statistics Office. Nobody would complain if we were getting value for money, but we are being ripped off.

One former veterinarian working for the Government used to tell the story of his late boss questioning a couple of colleagues about their work for the week. They said they were in one place on Monday, another place on Tuesday, and yet another place on Wednesday. Then one of them added: “We did f-all on Thursday and Friday”.

“I know you did f-all,” the boss responded, “but where did you do it?”

Any number of people who work in the public service could regale you endlessly with such stories. It seems incapable of running anything efficiently for long. Occasionally some very talented administrator does a good job, but he then moves on and some clown inevitably takes over, stifling initiative and clogging up the works.

PEOPLE in the public service are promoted until they reach their level of incompetence, and then they are left there. Conscientious workers soon become demoralised because the work ethic is stifled.

The greatest waste of all is in the health service. Money is being poured into a black hole. “I am certainly sick of hearing that we have Third World health and public services,” IMPACT president Stephen Lyons told the union’s conference during the week.

The nurses and doctors on call are not responsible for the mess. They are among the victims of the chaos in A&E departments. It is the health administration that is primarily responsible.

Of course, it seems Mr Lyons would have us believe that things are running efficiently. Is he saying that all those sick people who have had to endure hours on trolleys or chairs before being admitted to hospital have been lying about conditions? His insensitive remarks were a gross insult to those who have had to endure so much in the A&Es, and it is also a very poor reflection on the union he represents.

Was he trying to upstage John Egan, the president of the Garda Representative Association, in demonstrating that he could get more of his foot into his mouth at his conference?

SIPTU president Jack O’Connor seemed to try to get into the act, too, with his statement that there was no way he could recommend a national wage agreement unless the decentralisation controversy was resolved. Like Mr Egan, he was promptly repudiated by his own people.

The decentralisation issue has nothing to do with the national wage agreement, but Mr O’Connor apparently thought he could hold the pay talks to ransom by blocking the latest round of decentralisation, even though it already looks like a dead duck. Even the Taoiseach is running from the issue.

Tom Parlon may be fighting on to get FÁS to Birr, but he has about as much chance of getting the DART to Dingle, if they could find it on the map. Birr is in his own constituency. Hence most of his colleagues will desert him because this round of decentralisation has been marred by the political hypocrisy of those ministerial manipulators who sought to move agencies to their own constituencies and cloak this in the national interest. That cloak now seems more like a shroud.

Those members of the Government who engaged in naked political opportunism should not be surprised that so many are now looking out for number one. This does not augur well for the social partnership that has served us so well in turning the economy around from the horrors of the 1980s.

The talks to find a national wage agreement are coming to a crucial stage this weekend. Inflation is not really the main problem; it is the excuse.

The real problem is greed, and the real need is a sense of patriotism all round.