Ireland is like Nazi Germany

“Everywhere, welfare authorities were calling in the unemployed for questioning and examination as to whether they were fit for work, those who were deemed fit were drafted into……schemes of one kind or another; those who failed to appear were taken off the register, and their payments stopped. Rent supplements were cut, payments to carers for the old and sick for medication were slashed. A working-class woman who asked the welfare officer for help in paying for her 75-year-old mother, whom she cared for at home, was told that the state would no longer pay for such people, who were nothing but a burden on the national community’’.

Thus, wrote Richard J. Evans in part two of his excellent trilogy on the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power, the year he referred to was 1936. One can draw the obvious parallels to what has occurred over the past few years in Ireland where our government has also taken the scalpel to benefits for the old, the carers, the sick and the unemployed coupled with the drastic cuts foisted onto our already ‘sick’ health system.

Perhaps our old and sick are just considered a burden on the national community?

So, it would seem that whatever political system a country is ruled by the poor, the sick and the unemployed will always pay so as to protect the rich and powerful.

Here, just like the freely elected 1936 Nazi government, pensions, salaries, expenses and ‘entitlements’ were protected and increased for the elite.

Only faces and party names change in this world when it comes to exploiting the weakest to protect and enhance the elite- those who believe

this is their entitlement for “serving” in the national interest.

Self-interest, more likely.

Denis Moloney

Tinkers Hill

Kilnagurteen

Macroom

Co Cork