Financial distress - Vulnerable people face waiting list

The Money Advice and Budgeting Service (Mabs) was established to advice people in financial distress.

People would not normally go to strangers for such advice without being close to desperation, but when they do go they are faced with protracted delays before they actually get to meet anyone.

Society has been turning a blind eye to some of the more extreme problems. A coroner yesterday stated that suicide has almost reached “contagion levels” in west Limerick, but suicides are not being recorded as such. Thus, the real extent of the problem is being obscured, because there is no legal framework for recognising suicide.

It is recorded as death in accordance with the medical evidence, or some such euphemism. “Is that an Irish solution to an Irish problem?” the coroner asked. It amounts to society imitating the ostrich by burying its head in the sand.

Mabs is made up of a network of 53 companies, covering the whole country. It provides a national telephone helpline that is available from 9am to 8pm, Monday to Friday, and the service has a website that can be accessed whenever it may be needed. Such services provide the advice that many people require.

People in financial dire straits — the people most in need of Mabs — may not have ready access to a telephone, much less a website. In any event, if they need face-to-face service, they will be directed to a local Mabs office.

The waiting time for an initial meeting fluctuates greatly in different parts of the country. According to statistics released at the end of June, the average waiting time for an appointment is 4.4 weeks throughout the country, but there are eight areas which have a waiting time of more than six weeks.

Those seeking such advice in Donegal North have to wait the longest. The 160 people waiting there at the end of June will have to wait for 20.2 weeks for their first appointment, which means that anybody applying now will have to wait until Christmas to be seen. There were just four people waiting for an appointment in Donegal South, but they have to wait for 6.2 weeks.

By contrast, at the far end of the county in Wexford, the waiting time for three times as many people is little over a week. One must ask why there is such a discrepancy in the waiting times because such delays could be intolerable for people distracted by the worry of financial distress.

In the two offices in Co Waterford, the waiting time was given as less than a week, but even that would seemed to be excessive in one instance. There was actually nobody waiting for an appointment on Jun 30 in Waterford West, but curiously the waiting time was given as 0.6 of a week. It would be nice to know why it was going to take so long to see nobody at all.