Simon Harris's dole as a 'way of life' comment is Fine Gael kicking us while we're down

The Department of Social Protection has significantly ramped up its reviews of allowances for disability, caring, and invalidity, while our support for disabled people to access work remains among the poorest in Europe, writes Dean Buckley 

Fine Gael leader Simon Harris told his party's ard fheis at University College Cork on Saturday: 'At a time of full employment, it is simply not acceptable for any person to remain on the live register year after year after year.'

Last weekend, Simon Harris used his speech at the Fine Gael ard fheis to announce the next phase of the party's never-ending war on welfare, promising to penalise the supposed scroungers who treat dole as a “way of life”.

“At a time of full employment, it is simply not acceptable for any person to remain on the live register year after year after year,” said the leader, who has never worked outside elected politics.

We already penalise people on the dole who fail to show they are making a good-faith effort to find employment — something the Tánaiste should well know, given his party held the welfare brief from 2015 to 2025.

There are also many reasons a person might be on the dole for several years. For example, we have one of the most highly-educated workforces in the world, which puts early school leavers at a distinct disadvantage in the labour market.

Plenty of people earnestly seeking paid work have a skills mismatch, with jobs available in their area and responsibilities that make commuting or relocating difficult to impossible. Some are part-time and casual workers taking all the hours they can, but who still need a welfare payment to (just about, maybe) keep the wolf from their door.

Many are stuck on waiting lists for diagnoses that would qualify them for a disability-related benefit — if there is even a waiting list to be stuck on, given the lack of public pathways for adult diagnosis of autism and ADHD in this country.

Others are struggling with addiction in a country that has never adequately funded rehabilitation services for substance abuse, and which has no dedicated services whatsoever for the growing scourge of gambling addiction.

The data is clear

Stepping away from the human experience to the hard data reveals another significant component of long-term unemployment.

Figures released on foot of a parliamentary question by Carol Nolan TD last month showed that 17,000 or so people have been in continuous receipt of either jobseeker’s allowance or benefit for five years or more.

Almost half are over 50 and a fifth are over 60, many of them workers left behind by automation and digitisation in a century defined by rapid technological change.

Fewer than a thousand, by contrast, are under 30. 

The right-wing fever dream of workshy scroungers living the life of Riley year after year at taxpayer expense is just that: A fever dream. 

The young long-term unemployed are a statistical anomaly among the overwhelming majority of recipients just doing their best to get by.

Welfare reviews

On top of that, evidence suggests the State is already squeezing as much blood as it can from welfare recipients at large.

Over the last five years, the Department of Social Protection (DSP) has significantly ramped up the number of reviews of welfare claims it undertakes, albeit without the fanfare of Leo Varadkar's infamous “welfare cheats cheat us all” campaign.

I first became aware of this through anecdotal stories from fellow recipients of disability allowance on the receiving end of this heightened scrutiny, which led me to the data on reviews initiated by DSP in respect of four disability-related payments.

I asked for 10 years of data, both to see the long-term trend and to use 2017 — the year of “welfare cheats cheat us all” — as a handy yardstick.

I then divided the number of reviews by the number of recipients each year to control for variation in population and calculate a rough figure for the percentage of claims reviewed.

Ironically, the increase in reviews of disability allowance — my initial reason for looking — was fairly modest, with the percentage of recipients reviewed rising from 4.1% in 2021 to 7.1% in 2025, well below their 10-year peak of 11% in 2017.

However, the results for carer's allowance, invalidity pension, and blind pension were striking.

Reviews of carer's allowance have grown steadily over the last five years, from 4.6% in 2021 to 17.1% in 2025 — almost double the percentage recorded in 2017.

Put another way, while the number of people receiving carer's allowance rose by just 15% over the last five years, the number of reviews of their claims increased by over 300%.

Invalidity pension — which has maintained a steady population of around 55,000 recipients each year — wobbled between 1% and 2.5% for the first nine years before spiking to 6.5% in 2025.

Blind pension had the smallest number of recipients and thus the most variable numbers but still showed a distinct long-term trend of increased reviews, with a five-year average of 21.5% from 2015 to 2020 versus 34.5% from 2021 to 2025.

This shift is particularly notable because while the number of people on the other three payments is steady or growing, the number on blind pension has fallen more than a quarter over the last decade, yet reviews still rose drastically.

I should note these figures include reviews initiated at the request of recipients, but the numbers are astounding nonetheless.

I later found similar rises in reviews of jobseeker's allowance and one-parent family payment, though neither have yet returned to the extraordinary levels of scrutiny applied to them in 2017.

All these increases have come despite the department reporting just 0.1% of its budget was lost to fraud in 2021.

Waste of resources

It is hard not to see this as a vindictive and wasteful use of resources from a government that makes eliminating welfare fraud a higher priority than eliminating poverty, that eagerly kicks people off welfare but doesn't ensure everyone entitled to supports is getting them, that runs free seminars to show businesses how to apply for public contracts but leaves the poor to navigate a hostile welfare system on our own.

Moreover, it is difficult to swallow talk of “those who can work should” from a government that has consistently failed to enable workforce participation for disabled people. 

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Ireland has one of the worst employment rates for disabled people in Europe and few protections from discrimination by employers, while the convoluted and onerous means testing on disability allowance punishes recipients like me when we do manage to find accessible paid work. 

As far as exclusion from work goes, I would be remiss not to mention the systematic exclusion of Travellers. 

No one who actually cared about getting more people into the workforce would be harping on about long-term dole when all these squeaky wheels are crying out for grease. Nor would a party serious about lifting people out of poverty invest so much in kicking us while we're down.

• Dean Buckley is an independent journalist and community activist from Cahir, Co Tipperary. He is the co-chair of the Tipperary Disabled Persons' Organisation, a cross-impairment collective of disabled people who advocate for disability rights in Tipperary.