Life on the dole is the lack of a lot more than just cash

She went off to Australia. Back then, emigration was just fun. Now, as part-owner of a house worth nothing, a massive mortgage, three children and parents whose health deteriorates by the day, emigration not only doesn’t look like fun, it doesn’t look possible.

SHE appeared in a magazine a few years ago. She was one of a small group of “Women to Watch”. The accompanying picture showed her: tall, blonde, slender, dressed in a pinstripe trouser suit. The same suit, a bit threadbare now, she wears, these days, to collect her dole.

It took her a while to get a grip on the dole queue system. It helped when a quiet man standing near her in the queue suggested she come at 7:30am.

“I think it will suit you better,” he said, enigmatically

Next time, she arrived at 7:30am, to find herself tenth in a queue filled with people quite unlike the later-in-the-day dole queuers, who tended to wear pyjamas and talk with enthusiasm and volume. The early morning crowd, in sharp contrast, were quiet, scrubbed, tailored non-smokers.

“I paid taxes and PRSI for this since I was 17,” she shrugs.

“But it is desperate to be in a dole queue. Every one of us, on the early queue is fragile, shamed. We bring books from the Booker shortlist. We take it in turns to keep blood flow to our feet by going off to get takeout coffees. It’s done on a treat basis. Treats in the prison yard for people too winded to protest at what’s happened to them.”

The early morning queuers are more careful to leave a space between them and the person in front of them, whereas the later pyjama wearers crowd up together.

“They’re much more in the know, too,” she says. “Us early morning people are too new to know and too self-conscious to ask, but the PJ crowd can tell each other every runic secret of the system.”

The pinstripe wearers, on the other hand, used to be in the know, used to be able to tell each other every runic secret of a lot of systems now obsolete.

They were the kind of people who have thousands invested in insurance policies they started in case anything went wrong – but now they’ve lost their jobs, they can’t keep up the payments and are seriously worried about the future.

They find that when you become a dole queuer you swap your personality for a series of digits. Your PRSI number is all that matters about you.

Whenever the early morning queuers share any of their details with another person in the social welfare line, they sound permanently, chronically shocked. One morning, the blonde in the pinstripes, out of the blue, is asked by an anorak-wearing redhead behind her if she has children. She nods.

“Me, too,” the redhead says. “The eldest needs braces. You know what I’d just found out? Technically, I’m entitled to a medical card as I’m on the dole and my husband is an OAP. But, here’s the catch. Because I kept some of my redundancy for a crisis, so we’ve hung on to our home, so far, we’re entitled to nothing. They look in detail at your bank accounts. So, the system won’t help you when you’re trying to keep yourself and your family afloat. It’ll only help you when you’re past the point where you can do anything and are entirely dependent on it.”

The others ahead of the redhead in the queue shuffle forward a little, as if to get away from her.

Not that she’s loud. It’s just that she’s good and mad, and most of them have got over the good-and-mad stage and progressed to the good-and-depressed stage.

Someone murmurs that they’ve heard insurance companies getting a bad name for not paying up on redundancy policies but Cardiff Pinnacle have given them no trouble at all. And been polite, too. Even some of those ostensibly not listening nod in affirmation at one company doing what it’s supposed to do. any person or system acting the way they’re supposed to is a relief to the early bird dole queuers, because their confidence in anything working the way it should is so shattered. They’re the kind of people who saved for the rainy day. They had the emergency financial safety net. Some of them still have it, and are wondering what they’re keeping it for.

The blonde in the pinstripe has no financial safety net money. She doesn’t even have the metaphorical safety net of emigration. That’s what she did during the last recession. She graduated, went off to Australia, had a great time, made some money, and came back to settle down. Back then, emigration was just fun. Now, as part-owner of a house worth nothing, a massive mortgage, three children and parents whose health deteriorates by the day, emigration not only doesn’t look like fun, it doesn’t look possible.

“I’m ring-fenced by boundaries I never, up to now, experienced,” she says. “I remember once undergoing a psychometric test and being told I took ‘the helicopter view’. I could take the long view. One of the things being on the dole does for you is it removes your capacity to take the long view. Instead of imagining five years down the road, you first plan for five months, then it pulls back to five days. That’s what life on the dole is like. It’s not only about the lack of money. It’s about the lack of self, privacy, purpose, everything you had previously. That you cannot contribute to the discourse. You become an observer, you check your reactions because you have to differentiate between the person you used to be and the person you are now. The next step is not reacting at all. It’s warming your hands around a mug of coffee for an hour, your eyes unfocused, gazing into space in a kind of fugue.”

She goes silent, imagining herself in that situation, having observed it in others. These days, one of the confusing choices she has to make is how honest she is about how poor she is. She has the urge to explain to the others in the early morning dole queue that the car she drives may be a luxury brand, but it’s also a petrol slurper that she simply cannot sell.

“I used to hate the ‘keeping up with the Choos’ phase of Irish life,” she says, “That was when everybody was outdoing everybody else in the cost of their homes, holidays, bags and shoes. Now, there’s been a complete flip-flop. It’s sort of deflation chic to be able to claim the oldest car or that you have to go and renegotiate your mortgage.”

The blonde, pinstriped dole queuer never thought she’d be in a dole queue, swapping poverty stories. She’s angry, but too wearied by the anger around her to bother expressing it. Instead, she’s concentrated on fear of 2010, when insurance policies run out, banks start to repossess homes and – she fears – she and her dependents have to live on social welfare payments reduced by the upcoming budget.

“We’ll talk more next year,” she says.

It’s not a threat or a promise. Like everything else in her life right now, it’s an unchosen inevitability with the optimism squeezed out of it.