BUDGET 2016: All I want to do is get a job, says Lorraine

For Lorraine Cooke, the test of whether the budget would work for her was whether it would allow her to get a job. It failed.

The 27-year-old Galway native, who has been blind since birth, is tired of scraping by on welfare and desperately wants to get a paying job.

But to do that, she needs a stepping stone into the workforce and, so far, that’s been denied to her.

While some schemes under the Government’s Pathways to Work policies in theory accept people with disabilities, the reality is very different.

And the Momentum programme, which combines education, training, and placements, specifically excludes people with disabilities.

“We can’t access this employment scheme because we’re not on the Live Register. It’s like being told I’m allergic to work,” says Lorraine.

Nothing could be further from the truth, as Lorraine volunteers a huge amount of her time to the Disability Federation of Ireland, the Centres for Independent Living, and the mental health initiative See Change.

“I’m fit for work,” she says. “The amount of volunteering I’m doing at the moment definitely says so. But the groups I volunteer for can’t even take me on under this scheme because I’m automatically excluded.

“If I could get proper work experience, I believe I could prove my worth. I want to contribute to society and I need money to pay the bills.”

Those bills are hefty because Lorraine lives independently. She has a tiny, privately rented studio flat in Dublin which is a haven to her after spending more than two years living in hotels and bed and breakfasts.

“I was briefly in residential care but I knew from day one it wasn’t for me,” she says. “I moved out and hoped to get on a council housing list but that’s nearly impossible so I ended up in a hotel and bed and breakfast.”

She was forever on property rental websites and was just lucky to hit on her flat within minutes of it being posted, but she knows many are not so fortunate. She’ll be interested to see how the promise to boost social housing turns out, specifically how much, if any, disability-friendly homes are provided.

Lorraine doesn’t get rent supplement so most of the disability allowance and blind pension she receives goes on keeping a roof over her head. There is no increase to those payments apart from the partial restoration of the Christmas bonus.

“I try to see the positive but they’re just giving back what was taken away,” she says.

She’s grateful that her personal assistant allocation, 24 hours a week, is safe, but she would love to be able to travel independently and notes that the scrapped mobility allowance, which many people with disabilities used to pay for taxis, was not restored.

But chiefly, it’s her job prospects that bothers her.

“I heard a lot in this budget about people in work and people returning to work and I just don’t feature in there at all,” says Lorraine.