Unemployment benefit - Reforms can help tackle welfare fraud

ON the face of it, the strategy Social Affairs Minister Seamus Brennan intends to introduce in relation to unemployment benefits may appear to be State heavy-handedness, but the new system may actually prove to be good sense.

If implemented judiciously, it should infer more than a change of name from Unemployment Benefit and Unemployment Assistance to, respectively, Jobseeker’s Benefit and Jobseeker’s Assistance.

In August the minister indicated his intention to have an assessment of that type of scheme, which already operates in Britain, carried out here - questioning at the time how 100,000 people coming from the EU’s 10 new member states all got jobs in Ireland in the preceding 12 months, while 150,000 people remained on the live register