Provide a living wage, not stigmatisation

Your recent article ‘Jobs plan a community service sentence’ demanded an immediate re-check to see where this was to happen, maybe North Korea or some other such off-the-wall dictatorship.

But no, this ‘initiative’, which will force people to work for little or nothing, is to take place here in Ireland and what is even more extraordinary is the fact that we are under the governance of a Cabinet in which members of a Labour Party hold a veto.

Members of that party might be interested to know from where this “initiative” comes. Its origins are the infamous “welfare” changes Ronald Reagan introduced that resulted in the unemployed being forced to pick litter, dressed in orange jump suits, the garb of the criminal in the US, until the courts put a stop to it.