Government’s cheap cut cancels Christmas for thousands of children

THE Government that stole Christmas. And stole it, what’s more, from thousands of children and families who need it most and can afford it least.

That’s how one of the most far-reaching decisions in last week’s Budget deserves to be remembered. The Government decided to take the social welfare Christmas bonus away from some of the poorest families in Ireland, in the interests of a cheap and easy cut in public spending.

In doing so, they have added a new dimension to child poverty in Ireland. There will be children this year who will have nothing to remember Christmas for. There will be mothers whose stress and anxiety, already high over Christmas, will be unbearable.

To make matters worse, it’s clear that the Government was probably secretly ashamed of the decision, and certainly worried about it. That’s why the minister barely mentioned it in his speech, before hurriedly going on to other measures.

He was probably afraid that if he did spell out the detail — and outline some of the repercussions for families — there would have been outrage in the Dáil chamber. And it wouldn’t have been confined to the opposition either — every government TD knows how important that particular benefit is, and what good it does. On all sides of the House, they would have been shocked if there had been time to register the human consequences, and it is likely that the shock on the faces of even government deputies would have coloured most of the reaction to the entire budget on the day. It would have been seen as the time bomb ticking under the budget.

It is usual in budget speeches to go into considerable detail when the Government is giving something away. In budget after budget in recent years, there have been lots of fact and figures about how much better off individuals and families are, as a result of government largesse.

When things are being taken away, however, the minister tends to be far more reticent. On this occasion, if you’d blinked you’d have missed the fact that a lot of families, whose circumstances are already very grim, face an even bleaker future.

The Government’s decision to gloss over the announcement in the Dáil chamber may have worked, at least in the short term. The Sunday newspapers, for example (with the honourable exception of my colleague Terry Prone) barely mentioned the cut. Our national obsession with how the middle-classes are suffering seems to be sufficient reason to ignore the impact of budget on people who are really struggling. I know how much many ordinary families have suffered, and how great a struggle it is going to be to make ends meet for a lot of people. But most of us, I reckon, were expecting the pain, and I guess a lot of people will feel that there were really no choices. The increases in taxes that hit most of us were largely unavoidable.

But hitting the poorest of the poor is surely avoidable — especially by a government that insists on using the word “fair” in all its recent press releases (as if they had recently learned the value of the word). Oscar Wilde described a cynic as someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Anyone who would choose to defend the Christmas bonus cut as fair would certainly qualify for that definition. As it happens, I had really hoped to concentrate today on praising one aspect of the budget, one policy shift that I think will be seen to be really positive. The decision of the government to introduce a year’s free pre-school education for children is a major development.

A lot of the credit for the decision is probably owed to some very progressive public servants — people like Sylda Langford, head of the office of the Minister for Children — who have been committed for years to the development of pre-school education, but have been stymied by different political choices.

To get this right, a major job of implementation lies ahead. But if it is implemented properly, to decent standards, it will represent a significant legacy for Barry Andrews, the Minister for Children.

The job of implementing it is one of the reasons I imagine (and hope) that the Minister for Children won’t be affected by the promised and overdue “cull” of junior ministers. But the more I think about it, the more I believe that there is no choice but to concentrate on this particularly bad and disgraceful decision about the Christmas bonus. The people most affected by the decision to take around €200 away from them and their children at Christmas have no one to speak for them.

There’s no one to organise a march, no one to get the placards printed, no one to hire the venues for their protest meetings.

They’re not organised and they don’t belong to powerful trade unions. And the trade unions, now back at the government table, won’t walk away over this issue. It won’t be a deal-breaker, because the poor don’t matter that much. Maybe it’s just that some of the better-organised groups don’t realise what this cut is going to mean. I saw one commentator explaining patiently (for the benefit of the plebs) that because of the Christmas bonus, lone parents, for example, or people entirely dependent on the disability allowance, got the equivalent of 53 weekly payments a year. And now they’ll get 52 — that’s a cut of slightly less than 2%. PAYE workers and public servants are going to see much bigger cuts in their incomes and living standards than that, he explained.

They just don’t get it. A lot of lone parents, and a lot of the people whose sole income is the disability allowance, don’t have living standards. They survive, just about. Without the extra help of a week’s allowance at Christmas, many simply won’t survive. They will fall into the hands of money lenders, or they won’t be able to provide the basics for their children. And don’t anyone tell me that a few toys and crackers aren’t basic at Christmas.

This decision was made because it’s easy. It involves drawing a line through something that has no one to defend it. It doesn’t involve management, or hard graft, or complex communication. It’s just the stroke of a pen. And no one is going to suffer immediately. By the time the pain kicks in, the decision will be old news.

But none of those callous and cynical calculations make this a correct decision.

In the overall scheme of things, there is a case for a root-and-branch reorganisation of the supports families need and should be entitled to. They do need to be better targeted than they are, both at the people who need them most and the times they are needed. Taking easy options, and aiming the fire at vulnerable families, is a poor substitute for the courageous reform we need.

When Oliver Twist asked for more, it was because he was hungry. All he got was an outraged response, because he was poor, and the poor, in Dickens’s time, never deserved more. I hope we never go back there. But I have an uneasy feeling we’re on our way.