Lone parents will ‘talk to Joan’ at the polling booths

Voters will responde to cuts to lone parent allowance at the polls, says Shaun Connolly

FROM St Joan to Cruella di Tánaiste with one flick of the pen and a shrug of the shoulders.

Why has the Labour Party leader put herself into the position of looking like the bully of lone parents in a fight she may win on the ministerial order paper, only to lose heavily on the ballot paper?

‘Activating’ single parents back to work sounds laudable, but scrapping the lone parent allowance once the child reaches the age of seven and shifting parents to other benefits, from next week, will mean that 11,000 people, overwhelmingly women, will be left worse off by the changes.

‘Ah, no’, cries St Joan, ‘for I have freed them to do more hours at work’.

‘No, Cruella, you haven’t’, say the lone parents, ‘because we cannot afford the extra childcare costs, so we will be forced out of employment entirely’.

Indeed, when Creulla — sorry, the Tanaiste — first floated the idea, in 2012, she insisted that it would not go ahead without “Scandinavian-style” childcare arrangements underpinning it.

The wistful naivete of the Government being able to afford such lavish ambitions drew an incredulous response. Now, Ms Burton has stormed on regardless, despite the only hint of Scandinavian-style anything being the IKEA-esque bland woodeness of her insistence that it will all come good in the end and that everyone will eventually thank her. Incredulity has burned to outright anger.

In an unusual breakdown of her usually keenly attuned political emotional intelligence, Ms Burton has failed to grasp that the miniscule monetary advantage of this reform to the State is far outweighed by the scale of the damage it will do to Labour’s image in the run-up to the looming Dáil poll.

Snatching €140 a week out of the hands of vulnerable women is not the best look for a supposedly social justice-orientated party, as it hurtles to an ugly day of judgement with a deeply disappointed and unimpressed electorate.

The distinctly Thatcherite thrust of the enterprise may attract the odd Fine Gael second preference, but what good are they when there will be so few Labour number-ones to back up?

Far better to dump the whole tainted enterprise and pretend it never happened — something Labour had no qualms doing when it reneged both on promises to have bond-holders burned and to bring-in that “game-changing” bank recapitalisation payback deal they promised the EU was going to give us three years ago.

It was a similar story of aloof Labour detachment with Alex White, the Minister for Natural Resources, who should really be known as the Minister for Natural Smugness, after his latest, dismissive remarks about the treatment of Clery’s workers.

After insisting that the summary notice given to the 460 workers was “unacceptable” — erm, you are the people in power, Minister, so you are the only people who have actually accepted this — he said the Government would look at tinkering with company law, maybe.

This would be the same company legislation that the Coalition pushed through the Dáil not that long ago. But they failed to notice the giant loophole that allowed the new owners of Clery’s to operate in the perfectly legal, but perfectly repugnant, way they did, so we probably shouldn’t hold out too much hope of ministers doing any better this time around.

The Minister for Natural Smugness then oozed out this oily little gem of drive-by disassociation, saying: “I don’t think anybody should imagine there is a law that we can introduce next week in the Dáil that stops capitalism from operating in the way that it does.”

Well, Alex:

(A) Thanks for giving us the biggest chortle of the week, by suggesting Labour would actually do anything to stand in the way of unfettered jackboot capitalism, and..

(B) Nobody was asking you to “stop capitalism”, they were merely asking you to ensure that workers, like the ones at Clery’s, are afforded the basic levels of dignity and respect by their employers.

Considering it took Labour four years to set up a low-pay commission (which is still yet to report), and a similar amount of time to draw-up promised tougher regulations on minimum- and zero-hours contracts (which, despite the continuing Dunnes Stores dispute, seem to be nowhere in sight), perhaps a bit more empathy from the self-styled ‘People’s Party’ might be in order?

Detachment also dominates in the Department of Health, where Leo Varadkar has been dealing with the endless woes of let-down patients and put-upon staff by constantly saying: “Oh, isn’t that awful, someone should really do something about that,” without ever seeming to realise that someone is him.

As Minister For Bystanding And Blaming Someone Else (usually James Reilly), Mr Varadkar’s health strategy seems to be the protection of his own political health by keeping his head down until the next election, after which, hopefully, someone else will be put in charge of the chaotic mess.

But a rudderless HSE is a dangerous thing. As the Irish Examiner revealed between May, 2013 and the end of 2014, lazy, incompetent managers allowed late payment penalties to suppliers to build up to €9m. This pouring of public money down the sewer was branded “shocking” by the Public Accounts Committee.

The wasted money would have taken care of the bulk of the €15m cut from the mental health budget in the same period. How many people took their own lives because they could not get the help they needed, due to those cuts, while so much cash was being flushed down the toilet?

And given all the capitulations to the Troika’s austerity agenda made by this Coalition, from property charges to the water tax, is it not funny that the one thing Fine Gael had any spine about was resisting a major cut in the outrageous fees charged by their buddies in the medical and legal professions?

Having had to spend €60 this week for the privilege of six minutes with a GP to confirm I had bronchitis, this is an especially sore point for me.

At least he did not just do the usual and fob me off with antibiotics, but put me on the much more exotic-sounding steroids, instead.

I’ve never been on steroids before and so keep expecting someone to come along and say it means I am banned from something.

But if bans are to be handed out, ban Ms Burton from picking on lone parents, ban the Minister for Natural Smugness from patronising the “little people” and ban Mr Varadkar for life from pretending the health service does not have anything to do with the Health Minister.