Funny you should say that.

Yes it would. All we would need is another ash cloud were all flights are cancelled around europe and thousands more off the dole. It happened last year.

I read a report recently that said the ash cloud had no effect on dole payments. I think some people like to think it’s the foreigners are the fraudsters. In reality we’ve proved ourselves pretty good at that ourselves!

People have jobs you know…

Finger printing …. I saw a woman change her wig and coat one day then go back into the same PO .The post office official did not want to know and the Gardai did not arrive on time to catch her either ….

@Eileen Gabbett
Finger printing is sooo 20th century, lets inject radio tags under their skin, and shock collars so welfare recipients receive a ‘mild’ warning shock should they leave designated districts or have forbidden thoughts.

Christopher I hear your sarcasm ,What do you suggest to prevent people defrauding the state intentionally like this ‘lady’ I witnessed? Or are you saying she was right in her efforts ?

Why don’t we just shoot anyone “lucky” enough to have to be on benefit? Welcome to the new Ireland!!!

something a bit less authoritarian? or maybe we should just fingerprint everyone including yourself, for all we know you could potentially commit some sort of fraud it would be much better to have your fingerprints now.

nah oisin, that would be a waste.
maybe labour camps? with an exact calorific count according to which type of labour they get assigned to..

Wow Christopher, paranoid much? What precisely is the difference between having you fingerprints taken and a photo for ID both of which are more secure than the signature you have to give now. They all serve the same purpose, except people go bat shit crazy when anyone mentions fingerprints. Also data protection means the department can’t give your data (including fingerprint) to any other department.

@daniel

Well for as start our government have proven themselves time and again to be complete tools in dealing with other peoples data,data protection is mostly meaningless due to incompetence, or can you not recall this http://www.irishhealth.com/article.html?id=13504

. Though if you want to voluntarily give them your fingerprints you are free to do so. the problem is its the thin end of a wedge.can you explain why you are so relaxed in regards to your own privacy?

also Irish data protection laws are years behind the rest of Europe.

Quit paying very rich people billions for wrecking the system then take their wealth and use it to create jobs. That’ll sort out the biggest fraud!

I was talking to a local taxi driver last week who told me last year he took a foreign national lady, her friend and two children to the dole office, he had to wait for them. One came out swapped the children and the other went in. They didn’t hide what they were doing and laughed when he questioned them on this, so he walked inside to report them. The woman behind the counter told him to mind his own business.
Don’t be fooled, this sort of thing is going on up and down the country but we’re not supposed to say it.

“i was talking to a local taxi driver last week”…
ehh, right…..enuf said
its nearly as good as…”i have a friend,,,, he has this problem…”

@Joseph The taxi driver in question is a good friend of mine. Nuff said.

hehe!
Good one brian, you’ve got style ill give ya that

you’ve got both of them in, in one swoop
taxi driver and a friend….

Christopher Lawless
I do not mind ! I have nothing to hide and I have nothing to lose . I can give my fingerprints it is no skin off my nose ! I do get child benefit for my two sons … So what’s your story Do you agree with the ”lady” changing her wig and coat ?

I guess you’ve never moved and had your mail go to your old address! It’s what Joan “Thatcher” Burton did to thousands of social welfare recipients this year and many were cut off because they had moved WITHIN IRELAND!. Then she claimed she had cut down on “fraud” when in fact she had just made people’s lives that much harder!

What kind of moron doesn’t forward their post when they move?

last time i moved i changed my address with the social welfare office, my doctor etc but assumed that once i changed with sw that the health board would know 2…..apparently not…to me it seems bizaare

Bernard McNamara gets 200k a year and owes billions. He’s Irish and there’s plenty more where that came from!

Mary I think what’s so irritating about these threads is that everyone likes to pretend it’s non-Irish doing all the defrauding.

I’ve no problem with people who are defrauding the system being caught but as joseph McGee points out it’s a drop in the ocean to the real fraud that’s going on.

Mary u obviously weren’t 1 of the people that never received the first letter.

Jobseeker’s is collected in the post office, it hasn’t been transferred into bank accounts for years now, hence the queues running outside the doors at the P.O.

That was for new entrants to the system. Dole is still paid to a bank account.

Not benefits that don’t require to be collected, like child benefit. It’s hard to ask single mother working 45 hours a week to come in with ID every week to collect the benefit…

@Danny D: With proper identity other arrangements can be made to put the money in bank accounts.

It is the process of identity which is most important.

Most of us have nothing to fear and having an identity card would allow us to supervise government departments as a benefit. Not all civil servants complete the paperwork properly.

national identity card?
“Papers Please Now”…….no, gaurd i don’t think so
I’d rather shoot meself in the face

if we have a national identity card it would just make fraud easier, all they would need to do is copy the one card for all fraud purposes, next you will want us all to wear rfid tags and barcodes, who are you loyal to? its not the irish people clearly

Danny if we had a proper social welfare system that wasn’t being robbed blind then we could make it so a single mother would not have to work 45 hours a week.

keith, how much is robbed blind?

just curious, as my definition of robbed blind is..oh, dunno,, paying 10′s of billions to bondholders wit nothing to show for it.

I’ve no doubts there is a minority of people robbin the dole. now bad as that is, at least they spend most if not all of it in the “real” economy. of course, im sure u can come up with a few examples of individuals who have stroked big-time to reinforce some counter argument.

me too.
shame the tossers wont do something about saddling joe public wit bailin de banks.

don’t forget those in prison who were still getting dole!!!

pity those who sold us down the river aren’t in the nick!!
of course, those ‘scoundrels’ would still be gettin their pensions i suppose….

Joseph,
I think you need to get over the “banks, bailin the banks, de banks”
It is recovery we are looking at. Every penny stolen through fraud, lets just focus on child benefit, is dragging the economy down. What is wrong with going over every single penny, currently issued by the state (us) and track it down and make sure it is going to the right and deserving person. Piece by piece, we can rule out fraud and unfairness and restore what is right and fair to those who need it. This blog started off about child welfare, leave the rest out of it. It is to typically Irish that we tend to explode and talk about everything, and in company regularly over each other. When will we listen to a point, consider it, reduce it to a common debate and arise with an answer – to just one point, one actual undivided attention to the detail of one of our laws/allowances.

Should not All government departments be joined up at the pps point to ensure that those who deserve get their payment and those who defraud get caught. BTW this was not a Joan Burton move, it was initiated some years ago but the civil service deemed it intrusion and extra work to check people out.
As for catching pensioners, many didnt know they were in breach, and by the sounds of it those on here didnt know much about it either.

@Una Murray, we all agree thats its recovery that should be the focus, but when the amounts handed over to the banks are so huge, it begs the question are we going to recover when we have to keep getting EU/IMF money to fund the banks. Remember the funds in total they will get would run the economy for a number of years. Purge the insolvent Banks and start again. Anglo of whatever its called now should have been wound up long ago and until we get rid of this Achilles heal we may be wounded for many years to come.

Sick of your money being wasted then stop blaming people on social welfare and point your finger at the true cause such as super rich people that are being bailed out at the expense of working people, lone parents, unemployed, immigrants, pensioners etc etc. Unless your super rich then your just arguing against your own interest!

Una,
thanks for sharing what u believe i should get over.
i will not get over it. Not now, and not until justice is restored to irish people.
if u dont like my posts, and plenty don’t, ignore them.
if my posts irritate u,,, tough.

Yes, fraud needs to be looked at. But try lose the perspective of the fraud.
how much bigger do it need to get before it gets ur attention? or have u accepted this utterly
flocking outrageous ‘deal’?? or is a minority of people defrauding the social welfare system ur priority?

oh and una, hope ur impressed
i managed to getin a post without mentionin de banks!!

Una. I won’t get over it either. Joseph you’re dead right. Keep going on about it.

Doesn’t matter if you’re called a begrudger. I’d rather be called a begrudger than a bloody robber!!!

Huh?

I wonder how much paper work and humiliation Bernard McNamara has to go through to get his 200k dole! Does he get asked for his ID at NAMA?

Hopefully it will do away with the practice of using the same child for two sets of parents that seems to be widespread in the fraud game .

Same here Tracey. We only got the second letter. We’re tax paying Irish too. Nothing foreign about us. If there’s a conspiracy here we are doing it to our own. Seems to me like the Dept of Social Welfare needed an excuse not to pay the Jan money on time. Like to pay it on time they’d probably have to have the paperwork done for the bank in December. That probably meant it would come from last years budget. Call me a cynic or maybe even a realist but I think the country just needed to put off the payment cause it was broke!!!

Nah…I got mine about two years ago. A polish friend got one around the same time. I think as someone else said the dept don’t want to be specifically targeting foreign nationals so we all get the suspicious eye thrown over us.

Only a parent. Not sure if they have to be working or just resident. It’s an EU directive.

agreed lets make the queue up and jump through hoops, benefits receives should also have to spend a mandatory 3 hours a week in a stockade so we can publicly shame and toss tomatoes at them.

Do you realize its cheaper this way? paying money directly to a bank account is cheaper and quicker than paying a building full of people to deal with them.

Many non-EU nationals do not collect the dole because if they do they can be refused citizenship or residency by that scumbag the MoJ Alan Shatter even though they are entitled to it because they pay into PRSI. Even still if you have a foreign sounding name your are asked ridicules questions at social welfare and made to show ID everytime you go to the PO to pick up your dole.

I agree Chris. A friend of mine had hers stopped and she didn’t get the form in the first place. Just like she didn’t get the “reminder” they claim to have sent out. I do think all of this is a ploy to get the taxpayer to abhor the social welfare recipient even more so that when billions are paid off to private bondholders the attention is diverted. A single parent who got a double week in the week before Christmas and who is relying on her child benefit the first week in January, the harshest month of the year for most people, is hardly going to “forget” to post back a form that clearly states on it “Failure to return will result in suspension of payment”. There is such a thing as system error. There is such a thing as post disappearing. Joan Burton calls herself a Labour woman but all she seems intent on doing is demonising the social welfare recipient. She quoted in a report that figures for tip offs have jumped so substantially and gave 2005 and 2011 as her example and because they have increased “it must be fraud”. But in 2005 there was something like 600 tip offs to benefit fraud and 2011 the figure was close to 16,000 but she failed to include in her report that the live register had 89,000 people signing on and in 2011 the live register had 447,000. A huge contrast so of course there was going to be more a higher tip off rate. But because she has failed to include these numbers in her “report” the general public have been led to believe that the benefit fraud in Ireland has skyrocketed. And people on social welfare are now dipping into their pockets and taking their money. And all to take emphasis off the real fraudsters here. The bankers and the Government themselves.

Its beginning to sound like the daily-mail.

Speaking as one who used to work in a dole office, I agree 100% with you. Before there was a high level of immigration to Ireland, there was still frauds and liars and they were by and large Irish. There were foreigners, mostly EU citizens, coming in to make claims, but in order to qualify, you’d have to prove you were actively looking for work, so they were sent away to get proof. A lot of them would come back a few hours later, or the next day having secured part time work.

You can’t blame all our ills on “dem foreigners”. The natives have been scamming the system since it was put in place!

Totally agree. The tolerance for casual fascism in this country is disgraceful.

Racism….not fascism….ooops! We’re not that bad yet…

Don’t give up Oisin. Don’t give them free reign.

And Niamh, there’s a bit of that creeping in too! ;)

Jesus…not the bloody communists…(:

The communists statement was in response to a comment that has been removed. Not casting aspersions on you reada ;)

Don’t worry Niamh. I’ve been called that before. ;-)

A colleague of mine of mine got it… she filled it in and returned it……. no biggie ;-).. we thought it might be a case of the dept cannot be seen to target certain nationalities so they’re targeting random selections which include Irish people so that they cannot be accused of discrimination…………………….

In fact there are 33k people who are sitting on €220 billion which has thrown over 450k out of work and onto the dole. Reality is staring you in the face.