WE'VE seen the headlines. But how close are we to the truth about welfare fraud?
For that matter, how close to the truth do some of the system's critics want to get? The headlines are vague and varied. They suggest fraud costing the Exchequer anything from £300 million to £600 million a year. A rip off of the taxpayers rampant abuse.
The vagueness in some cases is understandable. The results of the survey conducted by the Central Statistics Office on behalf of the Government call for study and interpretation. But that kind of care doesn't suit the tabloid style or the crude populism of many in both print and broadcast media.
Tailor the yarn to fit the headline and to hell with the facts. Or, in this case, the survey's findings. At the press conference to announce the results, Donal Garvey of the CSO emphasised that the office didn't have an axe to grind or a position to defend. But he was unhappy with the headlines.
The CSO's business, he said, was to put together a consistent and coherent set of figures. And this, in its usual meticulous style, is what the CSO has done. The office worked from an initial sample of 2,600 people, eventually reduced to just under 1,500, who were interviewed in the course of the regular labour force survey.
Proinsias De Rossa and Richard Bruton had suggested an inquiry to explain the gap - now standing at 86,000 - between the results of the survey and the monthly register of unemployed. What they found was that almost 44 per cent did not describe themselves as unemployed.
More than 11 per cent said they had full time jobs, in 80 per cent of cases taken up within the month. Ten per cent worked part time, while nearly 25 per cent came under the heading "not economically active" they weren't employed but failed to qualify as unemployed. They were neither looking for work, nor did they want it.
The most significant finding, according to several commentators, was that 28 per cent of those on the live register were not at the addresses they'd given.
AFTER the CSO had completed its task, plainly it was for others - politicians and commentators - to study and interpret their figures. But some had already pounced, even before the figures were available.
Shane Ross in the Sunday Independent skipped the facts and went straight for the ideological jugular: the monster unmasked, De Rossa's dinosaur and how the Irish people had been exposed as a nation of cheats.
Mr De Rossa and his colleagues are able to look after themselves. But Shane Ross didn't just throw political mud. In the sleaziest style of the Daily Mail a self righteous paper which regularly stoops lower than the Sun, he carried on: "Many offenders are still at home with their parents while claiming higher benefits for living elsewhere. Single mothers are cohabiting with partners registered at their family homes.
"Our national genius for new scams and fresh frauds is boundless. The disease has been allowed to become incurable." That final claim isn't true or, at least, it's arguable. But there is a disease to which the Irish people have fallen victim too often of late.
It's the hysteria generated by those who are out for the ideological kill or eager to ape the Mail. Or both. Take, for example, the coverage of crime not all coverage, of course, but the type which assiduously whips up fear and, just as assiduously, exploits it.
People are told they ought to be afraid, whether or not there's evidence of a threat against them. Then, when their fear begins to show, the gardai or the Government or both are held responsible and accused of failing to protect them.
In another version of the same tactic, certain groups are chosen as bogeymen, supposedly threatening civilised society from beyond its pale. Not so long ago it was the turn of travellers to play the part.
Broadcast and print media joined the chase. The Sunday Independent ran a raucous campaign deliberately aimed at travellers.
Several journalists contributed and the overall effect verged on racism. One writer maintained that travellers - without exception - were less than human and liable to treat each other, as well as outsiders, in a primitive and barbarous manner.
Another claimed, on the strength of unofficial and unnamed Garda sources, that travellers were responsible for much, if not most, serious crime in country areas. But when the gardai solved serious crimes which were then being headlined, those charged or strongly suspected in most cases turned out to be not travellers but relatives or acquaintances of the victims.
THE old bogeymen were travellers. The new bogeymen are those who depend on welfare. And they are liable to be given the same treatment, not only by Shane Ross and his friends but by politicians who share his resentment at any attempt to make this a fairer society.
No sooner had the first tentative headlines appeared than Michael McDowell and Jim Mitchell weighed in, Mr McDowell as though he'd been the dependents' friend all along, Mr Mitchell with the patent nonsense that welfare fraud was worse than the activities investigated by the beef tribunal.
Welfare fraud is wrong, as everyone who knows anything about the issue is willing to agree - from Sean Healy and Brigid Reynolds of the Conference of Religious, to Sister Stanislaus at Focus Point and Sister Catherine at Ballymun, and from the Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed to the Combat Poverty Agency and the Society of St Vincent de Paul.
But they and hundreds of others, who've spent most of their lives working with and for the poor and unemployed, know the system's faults as well as its strengths. And one of its most serious faults is its complexity. More than 20 years ago Frank Cluskey set about bringing together and simplifying the Social Welfare Acts.
The first draft of the boiled down version amounted to 80 foolscap pages. This may present no problem to those who have accountants and lawyers to call on. To those who sign on regularly, it's an obstacle course or, in some cases, an opening for fraud.
And, yes, politicians have so fir shied away from change - partly for electoral reasons and partly because some at least: must have felt guilty about their own or their friends' more noteworthy encounters with the Revenue Commissioners.
There are those who've lost their jobs (roughly half) and others who, through illness or for some other reason, will never have a job: the unemployable. Many of the poorly paid - especially the part timers - couldn't survive on their wages alone.
Far from being the BMW or Mercedes drivers of Mr Ross's and Mr Mitchell's fevered imaginations, almost two thirds of those on the register receive £60 to £80 a week; 80 per cent are paid less than £100 a week.
One quarter are under 24 and, being young and poor, probably more mobile and a good deal less likely to leave forwarding addresses than the rest of the population. All of which may help to explain some of the CSO's findings, and why the case for a minimum income, long ignored, has become irresistible. {CORRECTION} 96092000126