Government must redistribute wealth of elderly to help the young

MINISTER Reilly must be wishing he was back in that happy land where he could mouth off about means-testing the medical card for the over-70s whenever he saw a microphone.

The €10 million cut to the personal assistant hours for the disabled has been reversed, but the cut to 200 home care packages for the elderly has still not gone away. Reilly must be hoping Joe Duffy doesn’t put silver power on the streets again.

We all hate the thought of any cuts to the vulnerable. But when we write a blank cheque to the elderly we are writing a post-dated cheque to ourselves, the middle-aged, at the expense of the young.

And they just can’t bear the expense. As the troika pointed out in June, the proportion of the population which is over-65 is increasing by 3% every year. Some time we are going to have to put services to the elderly on a more sustainable basis.

For many elderly people, the problem is not money, it is care. Though the CSO tells us nearly 10% of the elderly are still “close to poverty” — which is terrible — many elderly people are relatively well-off. As the same CSO report said, “Elderly people tend to experience lower levels of enforced deprivation than other groups in society.”

It might be worth taking the troika’s point, made in a report in June, that the range of supports for the elderly, including free TV, free public transport and the telephone allowance might be better targeted. Those precious home care packages which are so vital to many elderly people are not means-tested and it might be worth asking if we could find a way of providing better home care packages more widely, but at some cost to those who could afford to pay.

Elderly people tend to be fearful. Having money in the bank helps allay their fears. If we could guarantee the elderly that we will pick them up if they fall perhaps they would not fear handing over money so much.

My own mother — who has since died — had an extreme case of this fear. I remember visiting her on the night that budget night in 2008 when Brian Lenihan announced that the medical card for the over-70s would henceforth be means-tested. She kept saying, “They’re targeting the most vulnerable in society!”

Like many elderly people, she had gained from the property boom at the expense of a younger family. She had just sold her south Dublin suburban home for €2m. But her medical card was the thing that said, “We care”. She wanted to put that nice man Richard Bruton in charge of the country because she would be sure he would let her keep her medical card.

But no matter who is in power, we can’t get away from the hard truth that as this society ages it will become increasingly hard for the young to maintain the old.

It was an example of the worst kind of clientelist politics when Fianna Fáil wrote that blank cheque in the form of medical cards for all the over-70s, in 2001. Older people vote. They vote for Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael.

If they don’t like something, they don’t go away. Not like the young people, who leave. You can do whatever you like to young people because there is, thank God, the plane to the UK, the US, Qatar, or wherever they fancy.

And right now we are making it as hard as possible for them to stay. By protecting rates of pay and increments in the public service we are shafting the young.

Last week the unions and the Government hammered out an agreement which will see historical allowances and benefits to public servants protected until 2014 — but not extended to new employees.

Some civil servants get an allowance of €1.71 a day for eating their lunches at their desks. Some get €1,783 a year for franking post. It’s easy to laugh at the idiocy of these payments. What’s less laughable are the serious gaps in payment levels which are emerging in the public service between the old and the young.

In education, where allowances to new teachers have already been terminated, the gap between new and established teachers’ pay is in some cases 30%. What is most revolting about this differential is that the teachers’ unions have colluded with Government in opening it up to protect the vested interests of the older and bolder.

I don’t know why I’m surprised. We have a long history of sacrificing our young people whenever the going gets tough, and not only in the public service. I fought out from under the 1980s recession, when exactly the same “screw the young” policy was in force. I spent long years as a full-time freelance journalist, so under-paid I remember swimming underwater in my local pool thinking “If I never came to the surface I’d have no money worries.”

My editor buttered a scone at her desk as she told me full-time jobs were a thing of the past. I wrote a column on the shafting of my generation by their seniors which began “Did you ever notice something about people who say full-time jobs are a thing of the past? They have full-time jobs themselves”.

Paradoxically, it won me my first job as a journalist. My pay sky-rocketed. And an older man in the office initiated me into how to apply for bogus allowances, such as an allowance for publications although I read them all in the office. He had the master-copy of a filled-in claim form in his desk, which included amounts for Yachting Monthly.

Somewhere in the archives my own claims for the publication — so crucial to an arts specialist — must still exist.

The elderly lefties in their matching uniforms of faded jeans and elbow patches dominated our chapel of the NUJ and seemed to be concerned with nothing but dividing the pie into bigger and bigger slices. I well remember the late journalist Mary Holland stunned them by saying that the most pressing issue was the treatment of young freelances who, she said, “could do my job much better than I can.”

If I had stayed in my full-time job I would now have a large salary despite the fact that, like most newspapers, the newspaper I worked for is losing readers..

Senior journalists continue to pay themselves far more than the market can justify. They continue to tell young people there is no future in journalism. And then get on with the job of boring the pants off everyone.

But who is going to care for us when we are old? Family emigrated? Apply for a Home Care Package! What do you mean there’s no-one left in the country to pay for it? Could this be the recession which makes us finally cop on that we need young people. We need their brains. We need their energy. And we need a Government courageous enough to redistribute the accumulated wealth of the old to create opportunities for the young.