Our strongest disappointment is not reserved for our enemies, but for those in whom we placed our greatest trust and highest hopes.

On Newstalk Breakfast, Aontú leader Peadar Tóibín said that he believes the State should provide a “safety net” but that a decade on Jobseeker’s Allowance is “absolutely ridiculous”. 

The whole idea of Jobseeker’s Allowance is that you’re constantly in the market to take on a job, Each individual is supposed to have a personal progression plan, basically, which includes targeted job searches, education or training that they need. And the idea that anybody throughout all of that could be on Jobseekers Allowance for that period of time is quite shocking.

While Deputy Tóibín appears to recognize that the social contract has been breached, he does not seem to grasp the consequences of that breach. If the families of Éire are no longer able to house, feed, and clothe themselves, then the political class should expect to face the consequences of its failure to uphold its side of the social contract.

Instead, Deputy Tóibín proposes directing additional public funding toward further criminalising and penalising some of the most precarious, and supposedly protected, people in our constitutional society, adding yet more hardship and creating further opportunities for exploitation rather than addressing the underlying failures that gave rise to the problem. In doing so, he demonstrates the same failure of understanding that characterises much of his predacessors and the administrator class as a whole.

€800 million is a small financial price to pay if the objective is to avert civil unrest and preserve the status quo. A status quo the Deputy Tóibín is and has done very well from. to the tune of €100+ grand a year plus expenses…

The basics:

Perhaps deputy Tóibín could do with a civics course?

The Irish Constitution (Bunreacht na hÉireann) affords special status and protection to the family, but with very specific and traditional conditions.

According to Article 41 – Constitution of Ireland, the State recognises the Family as the “natural primary and fundamental unit group of Society.” It pledges to guard with special care the institution of Marriage.

The Irish Constitution also states that the State shall endeavour to ensure that mothers are not obliged by economic necessity to engage in labor to the neglect of their duties in the home. This specific clause is outlined in Article 41.2

Correct me if I’m wrong, but that implies that the People of eiRe established the State/Government with the explicit intention of safeguarding the family, traditionally understood as a male and a female joined in marriage, whose role is to bear and raise the next generation. And to some degree the Irish Government is the most successful in the world at that endeavour, that’s why the world is coming here.

Based on a household Home with 1 claimant (aged 25+), 1 adult dependent, and 3 child dependents, the primary weekly “safety net” or State compensation is a combined Jobseeker’s Allowance (JA) payment.

Father/Claimant: Personal Rate ( aged 25+)€254.00

Mother/Qualified Adult: €168.603

Children/Child Support Payments:

All 3 children under 12: €596.60 per week (€254 + €168.60 + €174)
2 under 12, 1 aged 12+: €616.60 per week (€254 + €168.60 + €116 + €78)
1 under 12, 2 aged 12+: €636.60 per week (€254 + €168.60 + €58 + €156)

All 3 children aged 12+: €656.60 per week (€254 + €168.60 + €234)

Not including: medical card, dental care, back to school allowance,fuel allowance, cost of living top-ups etc…

State payments like such as the dole are not automatically tax-free; their tax status depends on the specific payment type. In Ireland, Jobseeker’s Benefit is taxable, but the first €13 per week and any child dependant amounts are exempt from income tax. Conversely, Jobseeker’s Allowance is completely tax-exempt Illness Benefit: is shamfully Taxable after the first 6 weeks of illness.
State Pension (Contributory): Fully taxable for income tax, though exempt from USC.

Meet Family straw-Man Sean:

This means that if a married man (let’s call him Sean) with three children loses his commercial position, he is expected to support a family of five on just €656.60 per week. For someone who had previously been employed full-time, this represents a substantial and potentially unsustainable reduction in household income.

At the same time, the Government is directing substantial public funds and resources towards foreign companies, cheap labour, and AI systems that are already placing millions of jobs at risk. It is actively accelerating the transformation of the labour market while expecting displaced workers to shoulder the economic and social costs of those policies.

Now imagine that Sean has been searching for work for over a year. He is encouraged to enrol in a course to develop new skills and improve his prospects of re-entering the workforce. The expectation is that, through retraining, he can adapt to a changing economy and secure new employment.

Sean begins his course in January and completes it in October. When Christmas arrives, however, he discovers that because his original social welfare claim ended when he commenced the course, and a new claim was established upon its completion in October, his family no longer qualifies for the Christmas Bonus. Despite having continuously participated in a State-supported activation programme throughout the year, the interruption in his claim means his family is deemed ineligible for the additional Christmas support.

All the while, an increasingly gig-based economy, there may be no position comparable to the one Sean once held. Instead of returning to stable, full-time employment with a predictable income, he may find that the opportunities available are temporary, low-paid, less secure, and more stressful, leaving him and his family in a far more precarious position.

If accepting such work leaves Sean with little (or even no) greater income than remaining on social welfare, particularly once work-related costs such as transport, childcare, and meals are taken into account, it would be difficult to argue that it is reasonable to expect him to place his family’s financial security at greater risk simply to satisfy a labour market that no longer offers comparable employment or even respects him. The burden of adapting to structural economic change cannot rest solely on individual workers and their families as deputy Tóibín implies.

Sean, then returns to the Intreo office, where he continues through the job activation process. An appointment is arranged with the Local Area Employment Services (LAES), where he is encouraged to participate in a Community Employment (CE) scheme. As an incentive, he is offered an additional €30 per week on top of his existing social welfare payment.

One week into the scheme, Sean discovers that the change in his payment status has tax implications. Believing he would be financially better off, he instead finds that deductions leave him with even less income than before.

Using this example, Sean’s weekly payment increases from €656.60 to €686.60 with the €30 CE allowance. If that amount were then subject to a 20% tax deduction, his net weekly income would fall to €549.28, That is €137.32 less than he had previously received. In this scenario, Sean is contributing to his local community through the Community Employment scheme while taking home significantly less money than he did a year earlier. Despite being financially worse off, he remains contractually committed to completing the programme and cannot simply withdraw without risking further consequences to his family sole source of income.

Five years have passed since Sean first became unemployed. Determined to improve his prospects, he decides to enrol in a part-time course at his local Adult Education Centre, one that will not affect his social welfare entitlement.

As part of the course, Sean is asked to install an application on his phone to record attendance and participation. Although he has reservations about how his personal data will be collected and used, he reluctantly agrees because he wants to learn a real skill or talent.

Over time, Sean becomes increasingly concerned about the value of the information being gathered about him. He begins to feel that his data has become more valuable than his labour. He completes several ETB courses before concluding that the system benefits from repeatedly cycling participants through various programmes such as manual handling and cv prep, many of which he would never have chosen to undertake voluntarily. From Sean’s perspective, the emphasis appears to have shifted away from helping him secure meaningful employment and towards maintaining participation in a continuous programme of supposed training.

From Sean’s perspective, the central question becomes whether these programmes are truly designed to empower workers in a changing economy, or whether they have become a mechanism for managing unemployment rather than resolving it.

A decade in the system:

Now, ten years have passed since Sean first became unemployed. During that time, he has fully engaged with the State’s training and activation programmes, accumulating qualifications in areas as diverse as bookkeeping, welding, HTML, starting his own business, and hair and nail technology.

Despite this extensive retraining, the question remains whether these qualifications have translated into the stable, meaningful employment and financial security that the State’s employment system was intended to help achieve.

Job Creation:

Over this ten-year period, Sean has been living in “relative poverty” and received approximately €357,032.00 (three hundred and fifty-seven thousand thirty-two euro). in social welfare support, bairely enughf to pay bills but still about €150,000 short of the cost of living. Throughout this time, Sean has participated in numerous employment and training initiatives, creating a continued role for Intreo staff, Local Area Employment Services (LAES) personnel, ETB educators, and various administrative systems in managing his pathway through unemployment. Over the course of a decade, this has resulted in sustained State involvement in decisions affecting Sean’s employment prospects, financial circumstances, and the wider well-being of his family.

Personal/Family Data Security:

Sean’s journey has also generated significant amounts of personal and participation data, raising broader questions about how such information is collected, stored, and potentially used within modern employment and education systems. From Sean’s perspective, the system has created substantial activity, administration, and data generation, but the central question remains whether it has delivered the outcome it was designed to achieve: a pathway back to sustainable employment.

With Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael having dominated government for all of the past century, it is hardly surprising to conclude that many of the structural problems they set out to address remain unresolved. Consequently, when the leader of one of Ireland’s alternative political parties uses people like Seán and his family as scapegoats for the State’s failures, few are likely to be shocked, just disapointed.

When the leader of Aontú, Peadar Tóibín, accuses some of the most disadvantaged people in Irish society of effectively embezzling €800 million from the State, that is a far more serious and questionable claim, who is actually doing the embezzlement?

The Brake-down:

6,329 Irish familys Vs 166 TDs remember all this moniey come from the same place…

Article 11 states: “All revenues of the State from whatever source arising shall, subject to such exception as may be provided by law, form one fund.

According to figures released by Aontú and the Department of Social Protection, 6,329 people in Ireland have been claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance for ten years or more. This figure represents more than 6,000 individual cases where people have remained outside the workforce for a decade or longer (Fair play to them). forced to live on the poverty line (Not so cool).

To me, these figures raise serious quetions about whether the social contract between the State and its citizens the People is being fully upheld. A system intended to provide temporary support has, for some 6000+ People, become the only remaining resource in place of the economic independence and security that previous generations associated with access to land, resources, and stable livelihoods.

At the same time, questions arise when 166 TDs receive significant remuneration from the same public funds while families like Sean’s are expected to endure prolonged financial hardship and accept the consequences of a changing economy.

Consider the same ten-year period in which Sean was raising a family under financial pressure, navigating State agencies such as schools, Intreo, Local Area Employment Services (LAES), and other public service systems. During that period, elected representatives, including Peadar Tóibín, received public remuneration of €137,161.45 at people like Sean expanse via VAT, data collection and edu-cycling, deprivation of a livelihood.

This contrast raises a broader question: are the people making decisions about social welfare policy sufficiently connected to the realities faced by those who rely on the system? Does the distance between political decision-makers and ordinary families create a disconnect in how economic hardship is understood?

Perhaps the State should also consider the experiences of those 6,000-plus long-term Jobseeker’s Allowance recipients. Among them are people who have spent years managing extremely limited household budgets, making difficult financial decisions, and navigating the practical realities of trying to provide for a family with restricted resources. Their lived experience may offer valuable insight into the challenges faced by those the system is designed to support.

This man has such little understanding of powerflow I douth he could wire a plug socket. God help us if this twat is the closest to a repersentative we the People have, and i am afraid it might be, who the fuck encouraged him to represent the People of Ireland?

Our strongest disappointment is not reserved for our enemies, but for those in whom we placed our greatest trust and highest hopes.

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