Govt. sells us a PUP on welfare fraud to deflect Covid shambles

Bradley Bytes – A sort of Political Column by Dara Bradley

‘Welfare cheats cheat us all’ was a rather unfortunate campaign launched by former Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, when he was Social Protection Minister in 2017.

Officials in that Department subsequently admitted that using the words ‘welfare’ and ‘cheats’ in the same sentence was a mistake.

Not alone did it stigmatise people who were entitled to social welfare payments, it also over-emphasised the actual level of fraud in the system.

The Fine Gael leader rightly took some stick for it. Of course, it was right to a degree, welfare cheats do cheat us all. But for a person of privilege to punch down on people on pittance and cast suspicion on anyone in the Post Office queue for the social welfare payments was political opportunism at its most vile.

It was right up there with the anti-Traveller rhetoric espoused by Peter Casey during the Presidential election campaign in 2019.

This narrative is re-emerging with the Pandemic Unemployment Payment. Somehow it has become acceptable to turn our noses up at anyone on PUP; to assume that they’re scroungers who should be back at work; that they’re chancers earning more now than when they were employed pre-Covid.

With society already fraying since the lockdowns, it’s worth noting that thousands of people in Galway remain out of work and are on the PUP not by choice, but as a direct consequence of the Covid-19 crisis.

Many of them are in low-paid, underappreciated jobs, in the hospitality sector, who got another kick in the teeth last week with reopening delayed.

So, here’s some perspective. Galway Gardaí recorded two incidents of welfare fraud last year. That’s two out of 164 incidents of fraud in the entire Galway Garda Division.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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