Sir, - Kevin Myers's attack on unemployed people (An Irishman's Diary, September 13th) is so unsubstantiated by any coherent argument or reference to actual facts that it is hard to know where to start in responding to it.
Mr Myers totally misquotes the labour survey which is the only "evidence" he uses to support his outburst. The survey he refers to was carried out by the Central Statistics Office (CSO) in April 1996. If the survey was accurate and typical of those on the dole, it suggested that around 32,000 people were signing on and working full-time. Of these over 6,500 had got the job only in the past few weeks. This implies that the remaining 220,000 people on the dole queue were genuinely unemployed.
This level of fraud is, of course, a problem. But it is in a different league from that suggested by Mr Myers, who implies that everyone is guilty. In any case, this survey was followed by a severe clamp-down on unemployed people in which many of those who were working signed off - with the dole figures falling by 30,000 since the survey was released.
A large number of these people were actually better off in legitimate work, but were not aware of schemes such as the Back-to-work Allowance, Family Income Supplement, Marginal Relief, etc., which are designed to help the lower paid. This suggests that a lot of black economy work is the result of lack of information about our complex tax and welfare system. It is also important to realise that many of the 220,000 people who are genuinely unemployed were harassed and humiliated in order to flush out the small minority.
In any case the CSO survey may well overstate the problem, with the ESRI Living in Ireland Survey finding a far lower level of working and signing.
In his estimate for fraud, Mr Myers includes the 25 per cent of those on the dole who told the CSO that they were not looking for work. This was a genuinely worrying finding, but it is wrong to lump such people in with people defrauding the State of hundreds of thousands of pounds in tax. Has Mr Myers forgotten that during the 1980s, Ireland experienced the most severe and prolonged unemployment crisis of any developed country?
The internationally comparable unemployment figures (not the figures for people receiving welfare) showed one out of every five workers was looking for work but denied it. This went on for year after year. The vast majority of people who are no longer looking for work are the victims of this decade of bitter failure. For years they have dragged themselves around factories with "no job-seekers" signs in their windows. They did training that was an insult, took up work schemes that were humiliating dead ends.
Now there are jobs available and there are improvements in work schemes - though little improvement in the training available to unemployed people - it is essential that these discouraged workers be encouraged and allowed to benefit from these new opportunities. There is some evidence that this is beginning to happen: 80 per cent of those who have used the Department of Social Welfare's Back to Work Allowance scheme to set up their own businesses were discouraged workers on the dole. Many of those now taking up the Job Initiative are the same.
This process of helping the victims of the appalling policies of the 1980s to benefit from the boom of the 1990s is one of the most important projects our society must engage in. The project must be underpinned by hard fact, hard investment and quality delivery. It may well involve some political heresy for it to work. Mr Myers does us no service to such a project with his ill-informed vitriol. - Yours, etc., Michael Allen, General Secretary, Irish National Organisation, of the Unemployed,
Dublin 1.