No hope for a State lift for our unemployed youth

HALF the Cabinet being stuck in a lift on budget day was a fitting metaphor for a Government going nowhere.

The buzz word for the mean spirited cut to unemployment benefit for people under 25 was “activisation” as this casual piece of cruelty was sold by Labour leader Eamon Gilmore as forcing the idle, feckless young to drag themselves away from lounging around in front of their “flat screen TVs” and get a job.

And that would be just great if there was actually work for them to do, but with one vacancy for every 32 unemployed people this August, the only thing the young unemployed are going to be “activated” into doing is emigrating — or being forced onto the streets through homelessness.

Ministers keep boasting they expect the live register to dip below the 400,000 mark in the next month or so, but the main reason for that will be the mass, forced, emigration which is running at up to 60,000 a year.

Indeed, so keen to push people out of the country, the Government scrapped Ireland’s comparatively modest airport tax much to the delight of Ryanair.

You could say it was the Ryanair Budget as there was a lot of jostling and hassle in the run-up to take-off, the journey was not the most comfortable, and everything was laden with hidden, extra charges along the way before you finally arrived at a place which was perhaps not as close to the destination you desired as you had hoped.

In a crass piece of truth twisting which diminishes her standing, Social Protection Minister Joan Burton insists the slashing of benefits for the unemployed under 25 to €100 a week is not a core payment cut because it does not affect current recipients, but those about to be pushed onto the carousel of misery that is mass youth joblessness from now on.

It was the same unworthy, risible, argument Fianna Fáil and the Greens used in 2009 when they first added to the despair of the young unemployed by making them the second class tier of the already marginalised and abandoned jobless population.

Since then the number of under 25 year olds on the dole has rocketed and the slashed payments imposed on them have been pointed to by Vincent De Paul and other organisations as a key factor in the parallel rise in youth homelessness which has left the young victims of the crash exposed to so many more dangers.

A meagre €100 a week benefit is just a third of the minimum wage — a minimum wage that is already a world away from a living wage.

Public Expenditure Minister Brendan Howlin bleats that training courses will bring them up to €160 a week, but where is that training?

Funding for the so-called youth “guarantee” on education is completely inadequate and is nowhere near capable of absorbing the numbers of youngsters who will be lashed by this stinging cut.

Rather than stop them laying around in front of flat screen TVs all day as Mr Gilmore claims, the reality is it will force many to lay sleeping on the cold, hard streets.

One of the litany of Fine Gael and Labour election promises abandoned in power was the pledge to hold an emergency “jobs budget”; instead we got the limp “initiative” to set-up a work experience scheme called Jobsbridge.

With just one in five of the interns finding a proper job with their companies after their placement, the initiative has been dogged with accusations of exploitation and seen as an exercise more aimed at keeping 11,000 people off the live register than providing an effective way out of the youth unemployment crisis.

It would seem the only way out remains Ryanair, and while even Michael O’Leary has not, so far, followed through on his infamous idea to make people pay for using the toilets on his flights, Environment Minister Phil Hogan is already well ahead of him on that one and will be imposing household water charging from the end of next year.

This will be part of the stealth bomber budget payload to hit families at various points over the next 12 months which has already been primed by Michael Noonan, but will not explode until least expected.

January will arrive with a killer chill as cuts in child benefit, the first full year property tax demands and spikes in PRSI unveiled in last year’s budget will kick-in.

The cut in maternity benefit, which in an Orwellian twist was dressed up as the neutral sounding “standardisation”, will mean many women see their payments slashed in half when coupled with the move to tax the allowance in the New Year.

Coalition TDs are breathing sighs of relief that they have not been hit by the wave of public anger that greeted the previous six straight austerity Budgets.

It is a telling sign of the times we live in and the poverty of the political class that they judge pummelled-down public apathy to be some sort of victory for the system.

Labour are being particularly smug about the budget just because they managed to avoid the complete humiliation meted out to them by the Blueshirts last time around.

And while Ms Burton did well to keep most of the core payments and pensioner package intact, a senior Government official defending the abolition of the €850 bereavement grant because grieving families use it as “beer money” shows a worrying disconnect with people’s lives.

Those welfare wins have gone by largely unnoticed and will prove a false positive for the party with the electorate.

Only welfare cuts or rises excite public interest, keeping things steady will not resonate, and will not impact on the Labour’s dismal poll showing. A poll rating that is looking dangerously like a death rattle — so it is a pity they won’t be able to get some “beer money” from the State if they do end up in a shallow political grave like the previous Slump Coalition casualties the PDs and Greens.

Labour’s other big push to bring-in free GP care for the under fives is already beginning to unravel and look like it might be more trouble than it’s worth as 155,000 cards are snatched away from others to help pay for it.

The State, in the form of the army, rushed to rescue the ministers trapped in the lift on budget day.

But, to those ministers’ shame, the young unemployed remain trapped with no hope of a lift from the State.