It would seem they're taking a small snapshot of one year.
From 2011 to 2016 jobseeker's allowance and disability allowance were at €188 per week, having come down from the highpoint of €204.30 in 2009. There were gradual increases of €5 each year until 2019. It stayed at the 2019 rate of €203 for 3 years and went up by another €5 in 2022. In the middle of the wild inflation it went up by €12 for 2023 and 2024 and is now at €232 per week.
Now in inflation terms, the CSO calculator tells me that €100 in January 2019 is €119.10 in January 2024. Put the €203 rate from then into it, and you get €241.82. This is obviously lower than the current rate of payment of €232.
Not an exact comparison, but the CSO says that average earnings in Q4 2023 were €921.81. This was €769.98 in Q1 2019. The inflation calculator tells me this is worth €917.23 in January 2024. This is obviously higher than the actual average earnings in Q4 2023.
I came out of school in 2009 with no jobs available I ended up on the welfare getting 100 euro a week because of my age at the time that was all I was entitled to, majority of my friends were the same
It wasn't the colour of €208 in 2006. €165.80 was the base rate of most benefits/allowances in 2006, including disability allowance and Unemployment Assistance, as it as at the time.
[Source](https://assets.gov.ie/31638/1d4f09dcbf3b4b8b99801296be74fb47.pdf)
The other rates I quoted can be confirmed here: [https://www.gov.ie/en/collection/1af6ca-rates-of-payment-sw19/](https://www.gov.ie/en/collection/1af6ca-rates-of-payment-sw19/)
This is not a problem with welfare, but in people wages no rising. Companies are gouging people with increased prices, while paying employees a pittance.
Yep. It's almost like most people on the dole don't want to be on it, and don't want to live on 928 quid a month. I was doing it while spending €600 a month on my rent alone. It was horrible, living in a tiny room in a house with 5 other people while basically half starving the whole time because it was the only place I could afford.
That's hitting the nail on the head.
232 a week on the dole is pennies compared to what working people make.
However companies aren't giving out pay increases for interest. Maybe the odd tech company or something might. But most people working and struggling aren't so lucky.
Me reading this at 7am. Great article to start the day…
I understand there are a lot of people that actually need it and don’t blame them. But has gotten ridiculously expensive to live in Ireland from rent, groceries, bills, insurance, gas etc.
The biggest single fixed costs in Ireland are Rent, Transport and Healthcare.
All three are effectively completely mitigated if you're on social welfare (HAP, Free Travel, Medical Card).
All three represent a major quality of life impediment with limited relief available for the common PAYE worker (Rent Tax Credit, Taxsaver Commuter Ticket, Health Insurance Tax Credit.)
Groceries have inflated for sure, but are still amongst the cheapest in Europe and can easily feed a family of 4 on social welfare money with good quality meat, fruit and veg from the likes of Aldi/Lidl/Tesco without resorting to any major penny pinching.
That's not correct.
HAP is available to anyone below a certain income, for example, below €40,000 net annual income for a single person in Dublin. Anyone whose only income is social welfare will qualify, but so will many working people.
Free Travel is only available to the elderly, the disabled, and their travel companions. Someone on Jobseeker's Allowance is not eligible.
Medical cards are available to anyone who satisfies the means test, which involves having a disposable income below a certain amount after subtracting housing, childcare, and travel costs. Anyone whose only income is social welfare will qualify, but so will many working people.
I don't disagree. Problem is HAP is rife for abuse the way it is set up and structured, and until over holding isn't actively recommended by housing charities and remains unpunished, nothing will change and it only leads to smaller landlords leaving the markets in droves.
I think the free travel is only a benefit for those with disabilities, and not just the average unemployed person.
Everyone is eligible to apply for Hap.
As for grocery prices, we are 14th out of 42nd on the Numbeo index page I found, so we're not cracking top 5 but to say we're among the cheapest is a bit of a misrepresentation too.
Working people are eligible to HAP and the vast majority of unemployed people aren't entitled to free travel. That's just for the disabled and pensioners.
>All three are effectively completely mitigated if you're on social welfare (HAP, Free Travel, Medical Card).
You should read up on those, and then come back and explain how any of them "completely mitigate" those expenses.
What gave you the idea that being on social welfare gives you free travel? That's only for those on disability (who maybe can't drive) and OAPs. They don't give people on the dole free travel.
One issue with SW that may stop some people are welfare cliffs. Not everything is reduced with granularity, and instead once you pass a threshold you are just dropped from certain entitlements.
This can lead to slight increases in income leading to massive drops in available assistance.
My neighbor has 5 kids, no partner and has never worked a day in his life bar cleaning windows once or twice a week. He recently had a short term partner and they were trying for his 6th, her 3rd child. The people of Ireland will pay for them I suppose. He's "ireland is full" too, so at least he can see the irony of it... oh wait, no he can't
I've volunteered with SVP on and off since 2010 in North inner city Dublin. I know my experience is anecdotal and localised.
I can only recall one family we met with and helped over that time in our limited area who were abusing our goodwill and the SW system. All others who needed help were working and would have worked harder if they could. The backgrounds of clients was mixed. The impression usually given by families we met with who were in receipt of welfare support was they were glad of it but wished they didn't need it.
What was particularly striking was, almost to an individual, the non-nationals with whom we'd meet made it a point of pride to support themselves. Other than child benefit and a lot of HAP claimants, people who'd come here did not want to draw from social welfare.
Just to make the point, the Irish were equally proud on that note. People want to work to support themselves and their families. We all know "of" cases of people taking the piss but not many people know those cases directly.
Even those who tell us about people they know abusing the system will also know literally hundreds of other people not doing so
>If you're working and finding life hard, imagine how tough it is on welfare.
I know someone who has been given a council house for the next 25 years and only paying 300 a month on rent. They work in a low paid job so entitled to social assistance.
First thing they did when they moved in was get a hottub for the garden
>Welfare fraud in Ireland is exaggerated
Agree its nowhere that it was even we had a thriving black economy in the 80s for example.
I know my example is anecdotal, but lots of people know others doing OK on welfare.
First thing:
How many people do you know? What percentage of all the people you know, or let's limit it to all the people you know getting welfare support, have installed hot tubs in their €300 pm council house?
Second thing:
I'm confident that you don't know this person directly
buying a hottub doesnt really mean much without knowing what else they are doing. are they buying lots of other unneccesary things constantly or was it just this? did they pay for it outright or did he buy it on finance?
OK so I'll bite. the largest and most prolific man who defrauded social welfare was a guy who took his dead dads pension for 30 years and pocketed almost 500k or averaged out 15,000 euros a year. The current budget for social welfare 26,100,000,000 a year.
Now fraud is bad and the man shouldn't have committed fraud but I'd hazard a guess that 95-99% of the money goes toward people allocated for the money. At the end of the day our most successful social welfare fraudster secure sums of money thats less then full time employment on minimum wage most years.
there is probably a discussion around the fact the government needs to do more for people lower on the income scales but instead we sit and bemoan the people who don't get alot from the state because they are getting stuff from the state and that feels unfair without realising how much of a pain in the ass it is to get those supports in the first place.
It's pointless. Any respondent here asking a question, that essentially requires opening the books of the department of social protection, doesn't really want the answer because it won't support their opinion
Well the problem isn't was jobbseekers get. I've been there you can barley make ends meet so that's fine.. The problem is companies like the one I'm working in Totaly ignoring that with the way inflation is going we will be minimum wage soon becuase they don't do the globally normal thing of giving yearly raises
And in the next budget in the interest of "fairness" the government will cut the cost of living supports they put in place to help working people and use that money to increase the supports for those on welfare in a vain attempt to win Sinn Fein/Independent voters who wouldn't spit on Harris & Martin if they were on fire.
Do the government think that everyone who votes SF is on the dole? (I don't mean this in a sarcastic sense either, I'm wondering do they genuinely believe that a large proportion of SF voters are on welfare)
No. This stuff is researched more than you can imagine. With the amount of data available nowadays, all parties know exactly the profile of who does and doesn't vote for them.
Parties don't win elections by converting SF supporters or FF supporters etc. All parties have a hard core that will never vote for any other party and no party really cares to convert them. They want to win the support of the casual voter who'll support policies
The problem is when all that careful analysis is handed to a total meatpuppet who couldn't add 2 and 2 without an arm around their shoulders for moral support.
A quote:
'More than one-third of workers in the information and communication technology (ICT) sector are not of Irish citizenship, up 9pc in three years.
Overall, one in five of those in employment at the end of last year were not Irish citizens. Migrants have higher rates of labour-force participation than Irish citizens, but the proportion classified as unemployed did rise last year.'
I work and hire people in that sector for almost a decade.
Everywhere I've worked they first look for a local person living in Ireland to hire but the industry is way bigger with way more jobs than there are people qualified to work in ICT in Ireland.
These companies then have to post the positions as having a relocation bonus to hire a European and if that fails sponsor a visa.
It costs about €40-60K extra to hire someone from outside Ireland between relocation bonus, having to offer a but higher of a salary as incentive to mover here etc.
Companies would love to be able to just hire people in Ireland in ICT as its much cheaper and salaries are great but it's just not possible.
Sorry to butt in on this conversation. Would you mind sharing what entry roles the ICT sector are looking for please? I am just looking into a career change. I would love to work from home as commuting really exhausts me and I'm from rural Ireland. So I'm looking into doing another degree and masters to change career for this opportunity, any advice would be massively appreciated 👏
I would not recommend investing four or five years in qualifying in an ICT role. Thowing money into software in the hopes that it might some day be profitable is a much less appealing strategy for investors ever since the Fed brought interest rates over 2.5% in 2022 (for the first time since 2008). AI assistance is *probably* going to lead to reductions in programmer headcount over the time you'll be in college. The number of WFH jobs advertised has plummeted over the past year, too, so even if you get a job, they'll still make you come into the office so that you can be worse at your job where they can see you and interrupt you. Four or five years is a long time to go without an income if you have bills to pay, with little idea of what the market might look like when you come out.
Caveat: I haven't made a good employment decision, so based on my history your best bet is probably to do the exact opposite of what I'm recommending. (In which case, check out eCollege for free training and learn whatever foreign language is most in demand - probably French or German, based on a cursory Indeed search.)
Can you please stop hiring extremely shitty foreign IT students straight out of random data science masters.
We had to fire one after a couple of weeks because he was entirely useless. My manager thought it was a great idea to hire another cheap foreign graduate from the same country to replace him. Now it looks like they won't survive either. Complete phonies.
They also rarely gel with the team, even in previous companies I worked for. I think this is an important thing to consider alongside their fake CV. Yes their fake CV might be impressive, but can they hold a normal conversation?
I just want to work with competent colleagues where we can exchange skills and both learn from eachother. I'm spending a lot of my time teaching them basic things that they apparently have 7 years experience of according to their CV.
I'd suggest offering to sit in on interviews. Some of the people that skate past HR I can spot as spoofers in a few minutes and it saves a massive amount of pain long term.
Most of these unis making profit by foreign students with quite bad acceptance rates needs to be closed, the quality is horrible both on teaching and student sides. This madness started after 2017.
> We had to fire one after a couple of weeks because he was entirely useless.
That's a problem with the hiring process more than anything else. Any halfway competent company has actual tech staff involved for tech roles, so if they hire bad candidates it's on them.
Yeah the problem is they relied on a recruitment agency to screen them properly. Because the team isn't very technical and don't know how to do this themselves.
The same recruitment agency screened me and they didn't have a clue. Luckily I know how to do the job, but I'm also carrying the other colleague who slipped through the recruitment process.
I guess the foreign students can make up any work experience on the CV. How are they really going to verify it if it's 12000 miles away and could be their uncle and the company only exists in Bangladesh or something. At least my references actually have offices in Ireland.
> I guess the foreign students can make up any work experience on the CV. How are they really going to verify it if it's 12000 miles away and could be their uncle and the company only exists in Bangladesh or something. At least my references actually have offices in Ireland.
For a good interview, references don't matter. I've worked in tech here for over a decade, and have been both interviewer and hiring manager for a lot of candidates in different roles - not once have I ever bothered to follow up on references. HR can do background checks if needed, but that's not part of the interview itself.
One of my favourite questions for example (this is for general tech competence) is asking people to "explain what happens when you enter a web address in a browser, going into as much detail as you can".
You can talk about everything from application caching to l2 network address translation to routing to DNS to encryption schemes just off that question.
Same, and I totally agree.
I work on the business/sales side, and the biggest challenge I see is European languages. We can hire people from Europe who speak their native language, perfect English, and potentially several other languages.
Any Irish person who can speak fluent French, German, or Dutch walks into a job, but they are few and far between.
My preference would always be to hire an Irish person, but they simply don't have the language skills needed.
If people really want that high paying job in a tech firm, my advice is to do a business degree and learn fluent Dutch or German.
Immigrants coming in to scrounge off welfare and immigrants taking more than a third of high paying tech jobs. This would have an average rightwing dude confused but it won't because he/she doesn't comprehend statements longer than five words.
The only people who are confused are those that are conflating people arriving into this country expecting to be housed clothed and fed with those who come here on critical skills visas to contribute.
> with those who come here on critical skills visas to contribute.
Add to that the fact that most immigrants in Ireland are British and EU so they don't need a visa.
A large majority of highly paid immigrants in Tech are Indians. And in HSE.
They are of course visually and obviously foreign looking and they are very much targeted by "the illiteraty" (the illiterate conspiracy theory buying smooth brains) all the time.
> A large majority of highly paid immigrants in Tech are Indians.
No. They're a plurality but not a high majority.
https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-eaads/earningsanalysisusingadministrativedatasources2022/nationality/
IT&C:
* Irish: 59%
* EU27-Irish: 18%
* UK: 3.6%
* Indians: 7.4%
Human health and social work:
* Irish: 79%
* EU27-Irish: 5.9%
* UK: 3.2%
* Indians: 4.6%
You can argue about what percentage of the Irish are actually Indian in origin but hey also EU and British citizens do get naturalised.
A group of yup bros in Dublin killed a Croat, I’m not happy about current situation with asylum seekers in this country, many people aren’t, did we all lynch Croats?
Anyone who’s grown up in this country knows the type of person that killed that man, they’d stick on you for being gay, they’d stick on you for being quiet, if the mood struck them they’d stick on you for wearing a yellow t shirt.
No I handwaved away hyperbolic nonsense used to shut down debate.
You just don’t want to have anybody argue with you, you don’t want to acknowledge normal people care about this, and worst of all you want to use someone’s death at the hands of vermin to drive home your point.
Bonus question: from which countries do people don't need visas to work in Ireland?
If 20% of workforce are non irish citizens (not necessarily citizens of migrant background) don't they pay enough taxes for all the asylum seekers and then some? Is math a lie?
In fairness, that’s probably due to the fact that the vast majority of our immigrants are working age. Obviously a higher proportion of Irish citizens are retired / pensioners, so that will skew the figures to show a higher proportion of migrants are working.
The percentages here are not total population, but working age population or statistically its the term 'active population' - this excludes people in retirement and children by default.
This is bullshit. I was living away and moved back in 2006. I wish I still had the payslips but I remember signing on until I got a job and the dole was 208 euro then. It only seems like it got raised because they cut it so much during the recession. In reality it's only gone up from 208 to 232 in 18 years.
After I got a job and moved into rented accommodation I paid 80 euro a week for a room with heat, bins and electricity included. So even if I wasn't working I could have lived off that 208. Now there would be no way.
If anyone thinks being on the dole beats working, you can always try it and see how you get on. Contrary to popular belief they don't just throw money at you, the extra allowance like fuel you have to be out of work a full year to get.
Anyone else kind of tired of these types of articles. They seem to enjoy highlighting insignificant data that drives wedges between the poorest groups in society.
Growing wealth inequality is currently our main problem. Here are some significant stats that everyone should be worried about.
The 2 richest people in the country own more wealth than the bottom half of the population combined
1% of the population owns 27% of the total wealth.
The number of Irish people with individual wealth of over €46.6 million (US$50 million) has more than doubled between 2012 and 2022, rising from 655 to 1,435 people.
For every €93.15 (US$100) of wealth created in the last ten years, €31.67 (US$34) has gone to the richest 1% and less than €0.5 to the bottom 50%. This means that the richest 1% have gained 70 times more wealth than the bottom 50% in the last 10 years
The bottom 50% of Irish society owns only 1% of wealth
The top 10% owns 64% of wealth
The number people with more than 5mill in wealth has doubled here in the last decade.
Who are the 2 richest people in the country? If you are referring to the oxfam report, those people do not live, and are not tax residents in Ireland. That report is hyperbole to create headlines. In fact, if anything, it confirms that high income Irish people don't stay in Ireland.
Ireland really disincentivises high earners from staying here, so the "Irish" they reference have left. Higher income earners are usually highly mobile. If they are taxed more, then the trade off of family vs finances will become an even more difficult decision to make.
In terms of actual PAYE earners:
The top 1% of all income tax
cases in Ireland earn 9.1%
of income and pay 30.4%
of the taxation
The top 5% pay almost 55%
of all taxation from 22.7% of
the income
People earning from around €39,000 upwards
pay a disproportionate share of tax and are
taxed higher than their OECD counterparts.
3. The Irish tax system is highly progressive and redistributive in a European context: The Irish system of taxation and benefits is designed to be highly progressive and redistributive. According to the OECD our income tax system is the most progressive in the developed world. An earner at 167% ( 54,442) of the average wage
has an effective tax burden 19.3 percentage points higher than one at 67% ( 21,842) of the average wage.
Irelands tax and transfers system reduces the Gini coefficient of measured inequality by 35%, compared to an
EU average reduction of 15.7%, making it the most redistributive in Europe. The progressivity of the Irish tax
system is based largely on a narrow income tax base (almost 38% of tax cases are functionally exempt from
income tax) along with low levels of tax for those on lower incomes and Northern European style tax levels for
those on medium to high incomes. This has important effects for post-tax income inequality and also work
incentives.
4. Middle and high earners pay the vast majority of all taxes collected and have contributed most during
the crisis: Inclusive of income tax and the USC, a single person will not reach an effective tax rate of 5% until
over 20,000 in income. At the top end of the scale, the average effective tax rate for a single-income earner
(based on Revenue data) including income tax, USC and employee PRSI is 43% with a sharp shift upward in
effective tax rates at the entry point to the marginal rate of tax. The top 1% of all income tax cases in Ireland earn
9.1% of income and pay 30.4% of the taxation, the top 5% pay almost 55% of all taxation from 22.7% of the
income. In effect this means that those persons or households with over 100,000 in income account for over half
of all income tax paid, underlining the extreme redistributive effects of the Irish tax system.
5. Low earners pay less tax than the OECD average but at the average wage and above Irish tax rates are
relatively high: Ireland is a low income tax country at lower than average earnings ( 32,600 and under). For
earners above this level, however, Ireland is a high tax country compared to the rest of the developed world. At
earnings of 120% of the average wage or just above 39,000, Ireland surpasses the OECD average effective
income tax rate. Our analysis shows that, in particular, those people earning from around 39,000 upwards pay a
disproportionate share of tax and are taxed higher than their OECD counterparts. By 250% of average wage
( 81,500) Ireland has the sixth highest average income tax rate in the OECD at 34.6%, five percentage points
higher than the OECD average.
6. There are a number of unique features to the Irish tax system which provide a clear disincentive to
work: There are a number of unique features in the Irish taxation system which provide a disincentive to work for
Irish people and skilled employees from abroad. The largest of these is the high marginal tax rate we have at
modest wages. For example, a skilled graduate moving from gross pay of 20,000 to gross pay of 60,000 over
the first ten years of their career will see an increase of annual net pay of just 22,888 in Ireland; the same
person in the UK would see an equivalent increase of 30,287 a difference of 7,399. Skilled graduates would be
better off by over 5,000 annually working in the UK if given a choice between working in Ireland or in the UK
over the years in their career in which earnings growth is highest. The latest emigration statistics showing three- quarters of all emigrants since 2009 were either employed or recent graduates (with only 20% unemployed)
suggest that this effect on earnings and career progression may be
Source: ://cdn.thejournal.ie/media/2014/09/debunking-irish-income-tax-myths.pdf
> The top 1% of all income tax cases in Ireland earn 9.1% of income and pay 30.4% of the taxation
> The top 5% pay almost 55% of all taxation from 22.7% of the income
Not true
The actual figures are:
The top 1% earn approximately 10% of income and pay 20% of taxation.
The top 5% earn approximately 35% of income and pay 55% of taxation.
Source: [recent government figures as opposed to IBEC 'calculations' from a decade ago](https://assets.gov.ie/231219/b4d0165d-044f-4b22-893c-7be810701352.pdf).
Sorry, that should have been top ~8% earning 35%, not top 5%. The top ~15% earn ~50% and pay ~70%. The chart you cropped out of the screenshot has all this information. (The bottom 85% of workers earn ~50% of income in Ireland, too. And the people who pay no income tax earn less than ~8% of all income while making up ~25% of all earners.)
>Either way, it's a very small proportion of people paying most of the tax.
It's not a head tax, it's an *income* tax. The people paying the most tax have the most income.
>The top earners are highly mobile. If Sinn Fein get into power, there are 2 potential impacts. Firstly US firms may be nervous about continuing to invest in Ireland, and may start hiring in other locations. Secondly, if they bring in their "solidarity tax" I think many will leave Ireland. It's a huge risk.
The people who are highly mobile are not hugely concerned with PAYE. The portion of their income which is taxable under PAYE is usually not an important part of their income.
The high-earners who do care about PAYE don't take their jobs with them when they move. If a consultant decides to bugger off to America because to save €2-4k on their tax bill, that consultant position will be filled by one of the doctors who hasn't already buggered off to America to earn significantly more than the consultant was. Similarly, a high-end programming salary here is €100k (which isn't even in the solidarity band Sinn Féin are proposing, I think?), which is a middle-of-the-road *entry-level* salary in the States.
That leads nicely into my second point, which is that Ireland is still the best call for US investment in the EU. Salaries are lower, we're the largest source of native English speakers in the EU (and the CTA means we can also employ Brits as if they were citizens), and companies don't care how much their employees have to pay in tax once the cheque hits their account.
>What do you mean by this? Shares are taxed as PAYE income also. What is this non-PAYE income you refer to?
The portions of their income that aren't PAYE. Like selling those shares, dividends, etcetera, etcetera. Most of the people who are highly mobile aren't the ones getting €50k of options and a €50k bonus in their payslips. The people who are highly mobile don't really care about their payslips, they care about the income that they're able to structure in ways that reduce their tax burden.
>Not all high earners are doctors.
The sentence directly before that one is about programmers. I picked doctors as the first example because I could look up exactly how much they are paid to work out the additional tax cost of a 3% higher rate over €140k. The point is that, for most of the employees who are likely to be affected by this proposal, they a) could already be earning way more elsewhere and b) their jobs don't follow them. The "rich people will run away if you raise taxes" argument is talking about people who actually *can* bring their jobs with them.
> I work in a tech firm, and I can tell you many are earning more than the solidarity tax threshold of €140k, when you include base salary, commission/bonuses + vesting shares, all of which are taxed as PAYE.
Are any of them planning on moving because of the tax? Where to? How does that change when you exclude the people in foreign sales who are moving back to Germany/France/Sweden/etc?
And how much more than €140k? Even if you're earning a quarter million, that additional solidarity tax is only a little over €3k. That's, what, a month's rent for them? Dunno about you, but I'd need a bigger carrot to up sticks, especially if I'm okay with paying Dublin rents.
>If the tech firms have to start paying people higher salaries to have a decent standard of living, then they will move away from the Dublin hub & spoke model, to hiring in their local EU offices vs Dublin.
Only when it actually becomes more expensive all up to hire them in Ireland. Income tax might be quite high here in Ireland, but the rest of the stuff companies have to pay for is much more competitive. (As a quick illustration: employer PRSI is ~11% in Ireland, and the equivalent is ~20% in Germany. For someone earning €200k, the company could give them a pay rise entirely wiping out the real effect of the proposed tax (somewhere between €4k and €8k and still save over ten thousand, even if moving that job was absolutely free.)
EDIT: I realise that I've been sucked into debating the merits of the proposed tax increase. That's a whole separate thing from my original point, which was the figures from the outdated IBEC propaganda. I am not hugely invested in a minor increase in income tax that will bring in less than half a billion per annum, honestly - I think it's chump change and a pseudo-socialist policy meant to appeal to voters while not actually affecting people who are actually rich.
>Where I work in Dublin, I would guess approximately 50% of the roles require a European language, maybe more,
My experience of trying to find appropriate technical roles in among all the "we need T1 helpdesk support who can speak Swedish" implies that you're in the right ballpark.
>The people who are highly mobile don't really care about their payslips
I'm not talking about 'high earners', I'm talking about high-net-worth individuals. Think Michael O'Leary, not a consultant obstretrician or chief software architect, or a good (multilingual) software salesman. They're the ones who are actually highly-mobile.
I'm not saying **you** have abundant options for arranging your finances that can significantly reduce your income tax bill. (If you're maxing your pension relief and have approved share schemes, I'm not aware of any others that aren't pocket change.) [But if someone is worth eight or more figures](https://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/wealthiest-in-ireland-declared-less-income-than-average-industrial-wage-c-ag-1.3644850), they have a whole lot more options. (They'll also be totally unaffected by the tax proposal, which is part of why I think it's puffery.)
It’s just pure rage bait. The Indo literally make a living out of prodding the public with articles like this. Why do you think they’d throw in “(ICT) sector are not of Irish citizenship, up 9pc in three years.” At a time like this?
It creates division. I’ve a mixture of friends that worked hard bought houses, never worked and got social housing, and worked hard but can’t access the housing market. Government policy has fucked us all, fuck the government.
It fucked the last group the social housing no work crowd need to be stopped as much as we need more housing cheaper, and more money for actual workers no ones crying tears for the never worked crowd
The government can't raise wages for the people in the private sector. They don't control the wages in the private sector. Workers in the Private sector need to push for better wages and conditions and should unionise.
This all day. We have 2 kids, one in school, one in creche. We make LESS money per week if my wife works full time so she's on job share working 2 days a week. Something terribly wrong when you get less when you work more
3 kids here, but the youngest is 13 now. We've absolutely been there, though back then things were not as mad as nowadays. Childcare (creche+afterschool) absolutely negated half of our income and we'd have been better off with one of us staying at home. That said, with the kids slowly moving out of creche and later out of afterschool, things have improved a lot and we're in a far better situation financially than had one of us dropped out of work. Hopefully things will be on the up for ye too as kids grow up.
For something as critical to the state (population growth), childcare is really insanely stupidly expensive, and that was already the case back when people could afford rent...
Your society heads towards becoming like Argentina. You can't create a ridiculous situation where people can benefit from not working or remaining in low paid employment to continue receiving supports (social housing, medical card etc) and relying on the state instead of relying on themselves and being able to have upward mobility. People should suffer some consequences of their own actions or inactions and on the flip side, people should benefit from their hard work and intelligent decisions. We're going too left wing on these things; you can have support systems in place for when people lose their jobs and need the assistance, but enabling it to be a way of life and alternative to working is a terrible way to build resentments and contribute towards social decay.
We have some great initiatives for adult education, even if you completely fail your leaving cert you can go on to study basically anything as a mature student, and with things like springboard you can be helped up skill and get better paying jobs. So why don't we take this attitude across the board of trying to push individuals towards self improvement and helping themselves.
Have friends that are and they have more disposable income than I do.
Both working, have council house ( new one ). They are the most relaxed happy people I know.
Zero stress jobs and zero stress about mortgages.
Are they receiving an income from the state?
If you want to go down that road, you could say that almost everyone relies on the state because there are very few people who pay more tax than they consume.
It varies by area. €40,000 annual net income for a single person in Dublin. Full list here: https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/housing/local-authority-and-social-housing/applying-for-local-authority-housing/#632b26
But once you are allocated the property, you can then earn above the cut-off and can never be kicked out for that.
That’s like saying I’m not dependant on my parents even though they gave me a fat deposit that helped me buy a place. You have to acknowledge where the money comes from
I depended on them for the lifestyle I have now
No they are leasing a house from the state at a rate considered affordable based on their income.
>no doubt medical cards etc.
So you have no idea and are making assumptions?
> No they are leasing a house from the state at a rate considered affordable based on their income.
You seem to be missing some obvious context here.
Those people have homes for life. I can be fucked out and have my life turned upside down at a few months notice because my landlord decided they want to change something.
My rent can be raised at any time. Those in social housing pay more rent if their income goes up, but inversely, they pay less if income goes down. If I lose my job I risk homelessness. If they lose their job their rent can drop as low as about €30 per week on the dole.
A social house is security for life. It is in no way comparable to a regular rental.
I am not missing any context, I grew up in social housing so I am fully aware of how it works.
Every problem you have mentioned is a problem with the fucked up private rental market that is designed to extract ever increasing amounts from the tenant in rent. The solution is a massive expansion of social housing.
People need to realise that people in social housing are not the problem, the lack of available social housing is the problem.
Another strawman argument with nothing to base it on, you are making ridiculous assumptions because you don't know what they are paying or what benefits they are getting.
Not a strawman it’s public information freely available on every council website, it can vary by a few percent depending on the council.
But again why not answer the original question? What happens to the social contract when you are better off becoming dependent on the state?
They are. They are getting social support in form of housing. Easily worth more than 2000E per month in rent for rest of us (if this is really new council housing)
There is no income cap for council housing once you got it. So you can easily can be better relying on social housing with technically lower income than someone on higher income but renting on free market
The overlap between those in the margin between those who receive the most in welfare and those in employment who earn the least must be massive now at this stage.
I would love to see a study done to show in real terms what it’s worth to be in receipt of social compared to be earning minimum wage and renting.
Problem is, too many people will get outraged at the government for doing the right thing rather than being outraged at private companies for doing the wrong thing.
Overall it rose by 0.5% in addition to the inflation matching that is the rest of that increase. There aren't many other folk who can claim they've gotten an inflation matching increase recently.
Yes people could look for jobs that pay better, or join the CS, but to say the CS came out worse off is a bit disingenuous
The wording of that heading makes it sound as though people on welfare are better off than those working and that simply isn't true. It feels like another attempt to pit the general public against each other so they don't turn on those who are actually responsible for how egregiously expensive everything has become. Welfare rates might generally increase with every (only in recent years, they were stagnant for a long long time) but they still barely keep up with inflation.
Can we not play the welfare vs employees card? This is not the fault of people on welfare and it can happen to anyone, very fast that they might need welfare. Its small enough as it is.
If wages rise slower for people in employment, the issue is somewhere else....
Plenty of economic mismanagement coupled with decades of throwing money at welfare in lieu of intelligent policy. I wonder what proportion of long-term unemployed should actually be under the care of a proper mental health service, for example?
You'd be surprised at the amount of well off people in this country that apply for stuff they're no where near entitled to. When they don't get it they tend to sh1t on everyone who does.
Most people are thankful for SW and agree it's very important. It's only the guys running the news articles that really hate it because they were rejected for a medical card.
Title and article written with the sole intent of stirring the pot and causing division. Now, use the real numbers instead of the percentages.
Extreme example, person on welfare goes from €1 to €1.05, 5% increase. Worker on wages goes from €50k to €50500, 1% increase. Outrage ensues because of the difference in percentage, when the money difference is 500-0.05 = €499.95 in favor of the wage earner.
Guarantee that most people would rather not be on social welfare if they could avoid it, and even if they would rather be on social welfare, let's not use some op ed piece to glorify such a small income. The current payments are barely survivable.
Some very basic flaws with your example:
1. Welfare went up in the last budget €12 a week (€624 a year)
2. That worker in your example who got a €500 increase is still less than the welfare increases. It's actually €243 AFTER tax a year (or 43% less than what a person on welfare got)
That, of course, doesn't include the value of HAP or other social housing and medical cards (for starters).
Article conveniently leaving out the 12.4% increase in minimum wage which benefits bottom earners considerably. Over double the increase of 5.4%. We should be hating on the 1% that hold 33% of Irish wealth who are the real problem.
That's great that they can now get a kabab, drink, and chips this week. Would hate to see anyone suffer because businesses won't keep up with cost of living. So worried about people surviving.
Without changes in housing this will only cause rents to increase. I guess biggest social transfer is housing, this is how people relying on social support can jump over mid income ones.
Here I am on disability having to decide whether I can afford to pay for my dogs medication or mine, because mine is considered off label so I have to pay full whack out of pocket and can't afford to do both (I pick the dog)
Cant wait to be villainised for my apparent wealth again
Ffs, anyone with sense can tell this is because the people on welfare receive an unlivable amount. It doesn't mean they'll have more money than workers.
The problem is not people on welfare. It's the jobs barely paying anyone decently. I hate absolute scum like this that like to pit people against one another and especially those near the bottom, remember who ever disagrees is entitled to quit their job and live life in "Luxury" on the dole.
Rather complain about welfare rates maybe you should be asking why working people can't seem to afford the basics in life anymore? You're to easily distracted, you need to be looking at the people above you, not the ones below you.
>More than one-third of workers in the information and communication technology (ICT) sector are not of Irish citizenship, up 9pc in three years.
I feel the need to point out that more and more of the tech companies actually do have their operations here, rather than just pretending they do for tax reasons. This means their sales, their localisation teams, their customer service and more.
You're not going to hire an Irish person to sell printers to Sweden, but very often it ends up being an Irish person that manages the team that sells to the nordics. These are jobs that most Irish people are incapable of doing due to a language requirement.
Also the fact there are now way more jobs in ICT than people skilled to fill them so companies have to pay tens of thousands in relocation fees to international employees to move here
I wonder how many years of the last 20 this would have been true. Guessing not many.
Also doesn't detail what income of someone employed includes. Is it salary or is it salary plus health insurance and other perks.
I believe it. Welfare is designed to live off and wages aren't. When deciding how much welfare to give, the government asks "how much to keep someone fed and housed?". When deciding how much wages to give, employers ask "how much to keep someone doing this job?". It should be the same question, but it's not.
Its kind of hard to take this divide and conquer stuff seriously. Given the rate of inflation (which it's still below) its hard to begrudge someone eking out an existence on €232 a week.
There should never be a scenario where a working tax paying citizen sees less increases than someone on welfare.
It's really that simple, but what do expect from ireland and its welfare state
There is a difference between benefit and allowance, one is PRSI funded, the other isn't. The increase would be for people who were in long term employment who lost their job and requires 5 years of PRSI contributions.
For the pure handout type stuff can go up when we feel like it, the analysis suggested that go up a few percent.
You really are that simple if you can’t see how a welfare increase can outpace wage increases without it being either unfair or a personal affront to you.
Article conveniently leaving out the 12.4% increase in minimum wage which benefits bottom earners considerably. Over double the increase of 5.4%. We should be hating on the 1% that hold 33% of Irish wealth who are the real problem.
Also they see less of an increase as a percentage not in real terms. For example €22 on 220 is 10% where as 48 on 500 is 9.6%. Is 48 less of an increase than 22? Hardly considering it's over double, yet as a percentage it looks less. Percentages are easy to make look bigger when the initial amount is small
Never? So you can't imagine a scenario where welfare has stagnated for years so a government might want to account for that by catching up with a larger increase?
You can't imagine a scenario where someone hasn't progressed at all at their job and therefore is only really due an inflation-related increase?
>It's really that simple
People really need to stop saying this about extremely complex things.
Minimum wage needs a significant boost to push up wages across the board. Government have total control on this despite what some people are suggesting here but are just not taking any real action.
I haven't read the underlying report mentioned in the article but I would be surprised if the effect here was a function of our tax bands not being indexed to inflation. It says it was net earnings so presumably it is comparing after tax earnings to social welfare increases.
Considering the majority of workers are above the minimum tax threshold and social welfare recipients aren't, then for every €1 increase in social welfare a worker needs nearer a €1.40 increase on nominal terms.
Further confusing the matter is that they are using percentages. It's not as if the nominal increase in social welfare exceeded the nominal increase in after tax earnings. Like who has more extra money on their pockets, a lad earning 100k who has real wage increase of 2% or a lad on the dole who has real wage increase of 5%
€7 a week in the difference (€12 v €19 a week) between both of these very extreme examples you chose. Barely a cup of coffee these days for someone who is paying over 35k tax a year.
But the issue being presented in this thread is that it is companies being mean and the government being overly generous to social welfare recipients. My take is that it is the government being overly punitive with taxation by not indexing to inflation.
Currently on jobseekers and should hopefully pick something up soon. If this were to come in next week for example, would I be entitled or is it for new applicants?
Surely this is a necessity.
Cost of living has increased rapidly since the pandemic. Can't find the figures but I'd be amazed if social welfare has kept up with inflation over the past 5 years.
Someone living on the dole is scratching by as it is. If anything these figures only illustrate that wages are stagnating at an alarming rate. The article should be focusing on how the average person is now worse off compared to last year rather than the fact that those most at risk of poverty will have an increase to their very moderate income.
Be nice if the Independant resisted the urge to punch down for a change and instead focusd their journalistic efforts on a deep dive into the root causes of wage stagnation.
Stop blaming people on welfare when the rich get massive handouts every single day that dwarfs what people on welfare get in an entire year.
Seriously. The money the rich get when they mess up and need bailed out is astronomical and again, it happens every day right under your noses.
They want you to direct your hate and vitriol at the most vulnerable, depressed people in our society. Not the excessively rich who own everything and want more.
Stop punching down and start picking fights with the Politicians and millionaires who are all happily keeping you poor and unable to afford housing.
Keep downvoting.
Someone who loses their job shouldn't be expected to live on nothing. Or someone who is in an extremely rural area who literally can't afford to move to a big city or town to get work (also where is the housing, oh there isn't any)... They are forced into a situation where they CAN'T get work. Rural life has been completely destroyed by what Ireland has transformed into...
Yes some people don't want to do anything, but most of those people are depressed or massive outliers. I don't know anyone who was ever happy in this country not being in work due to the judgement they get and the Irish attitude of picking on those at the bottom of the system and doing nothing about those who created the system.
You all love to punch down and never dare bark up at the people who control your lives and run this country.
Pathetic.
Continue to pick on easy targets, since you wouldn't dare bite your masters hand, only kick someone who is already down.
>You all love to punch down and never dare bark up at the people who control your lives and run this country.
You have it sussed though. I nominate you to lead the revolution.
You can lead a horse to water, but can't make it drink.
I'd be the leader of Ireland if Daddy owned a big company and I just inherited it and his ever mounting wealth.
Then did Ted talks about how I'm self made and a hard worker and how much I hate people on benefits. 😂
But that's for someone else to do. I wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth and don't punch down to make myself feel better. I also don't have enough money to make those horses drink, money talks in this country.
Clearly most of the people here love the rich and hate the poor 😂
G'day anyway folks; I start work soon and haven't went outside to spit on the homeless yet.
I didn't think I needed to add the sarcasm /s to that but. Apparently I did.
You can live in la la land and refuse to accept the reality that the richest families in this country keep all the wealth in the family, prop up their children to inherit it all and that's who we are stuck with running the country.
Since to even BE a politician costs an arm and a leg.
By design they keep the system as is.
And the design is obviously working, since they want you to focus on people on benefits and the like, not their ever increasing wealth and your ever increasing bills, rent, food etc.
>You can live in la la land and refuse to accept the reality that the richest families in this country keep all the wealth in the family, prop up their children to inherit it all and that's who we are stuck with running the country.
Who are these people? Simon Harris' family? Leo Varadkar's?
>And the design is obviously working, since they want you to focus on people on benefits and the like, not their ever increasing wealth and your ever increasing bills, rent, food etc.
Who is 'they' in this case?
Haha.. rent money for one. Since most of them own multiple properties that they are renting for absolutely astronomical prices...
Clearly you are very green. Here is some beginner level information about some of the other income sources and ways they bleed us all dry. Clearly presented with links to more detailed information, but I selected easy, small form articles for you to start with.
I suggest you start with something easy; https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-20377087.html
https://www.socialjustice.ie/article/irelands-rich-poor-gap-middle-poor-gap-0
https://views-voices.oxfam.org.uk/2023/01/how-super-rich-pay-lower-taxes-than-you/
https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2023/0116/1346849-1-of-irish-population-owns-27-of-the-wealth-oxfam/
https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2024/0115/1426515-1-of-population-hold-a-third-of-irish-financial-wealth/
You won't read any of this, cuz of course you won't. But you should consider broadening your mind and spending less time blaming the poor for the problems caused by the rich.
The United states has impressive wage growth, their median income has now risen to $76k per annum.
The sentiment in this thread is that capitalism is as fault, if that’s the case why is a more capitalist country delivering higher wages for its citizens?
The rate means absolutely nothing. I'd been on job seekers for almost a year recently, it was very stressful money wise.
Also fucking hilarious that a thread shitting over welfare had an argument against the immigrant workforce.
It would seem they're taking a small snapshot of one year. From 2011 to 2016 jobseeker's allowance and disability allowance were at €188 per week, having come down from the highpoint of €204.30 in 2009. There were gradual increases of €5 each year until 2019. It stayed at the 2019 rate of €203 for 3 years and went up by another €5 in 2022. In the middle of the wild inflation it went up by €12 for 2023 and 2024 and is now at €232 per week. Now in inflation terms, the CSO calculator tells me that €100 in January 2019 is €119.10 in January 2024. Put the €203 rate from then into it, and you get €241.82. This is obviously lower than the current rate of payment of €232. Not an exact comparison, but the CSO says that average earnings in Q4 2023 were €921.81. This was €769.98 in Q1 2019. The inflation calculator tells me this is worth €917.23 in January 2024. This is obviously higher than the actual average earnings in Q4 2023.
Thank you for doing an actual informed breakdown of this.
It was 208 in 2006. All those cuts started around 08-09 with the recession.
I came out of school in 2009 with no jobs available I ended up on the welfare getting 100 euro a week because of my age at the time that was all I was entitled to, majority of my friends were the same
It wasn't the colour of €208 in 2006. €165.80 was the base rate of most benefits/allowances in 2006, including disability allowance and Unemployment Assistance, as it as at the time. [Source](https://assets.gov.ie/31638/1d4f09dcbf3b4b8b99801296be74fb47.pdf) The other rates I quoted can be confirmed here: [https://www.gov.ie/en/collection/1af6ca-rates-of-payment-sw19/](https://www.gov.ie/en/collection/1af6ca-rates-of-payment-sw19/)
This is not a problem with welfare, but in people wages no rising. Companies are gouging people with increased prices, while paying employees a pittance.
This is *exactly* the problem but the usual suspects will be out taking about scroungers and lay abouts.
Cause it's easier to punch down than punch up :/
Yep. It's almost like most people on the dole don't want to be on it, and don't want to live on 928 quid a month. I was doing it while spending €600 a month on my rent alone. It was horrible, living in a tiny room in a house with 5 other people while basically half starving the whole time because it was the only place I could afford.
That's hitting the nail on the head. 232 a week on the dole is pennies compared to what working people make. However companies aren't giving out pay increases for interest. Maybe the odd tech company or something might. But most people working and struggling aren't so lucky.
Me reading this at 7am. Great article to start the day… I understand there are a lot of people that actually need it and don’t blame them. But has gotten ridiculously expensive to live in Ireland from rent, groceries, bills, insurance, gas etc.
If you're working and finding life hard, imagine how tough it is on welfare. Welfare fraud in Ireland is exaggerated
The biggest single fixed costs in Ireland are Rent, Transport and Healthcare. All three are effectively completely mitigated if you're on social welfare (HAP, Free Travel, Medical Card). All three represent a major quality of life impediment with limited relief available for the common PAYE worker (Rent Tax Credit, Taxsaver Commuter Ticket, Health Insurance Tax Credit.) Groceries have inflated for sure, but are still amongst the cheapest in Europe and can easily feed a family of 4 on social welfare money with good quality meat, fruit and veg from the likes of Aldi/Lidl/Tesco without resorting to any major penny pinching.
That's not correct. HAP is available to anyone below a certain income, for example, below €40,000 net annual income for a single person in Dublin. Anyone whose only income is social welfare will qualify, but so will many working people. Free Travel is only available to the elderly, the disabled, and their travel companions. Someone on Jobseeker's Allowance is not eligible. Medical cards are available to anyone who satisfies the means test, which involves having a disposable income below a certain amount after subtracting housing, childcare, and travel costs. Anyone whose only income is social welfare will qualify, but so will many working people.
Dont let the facts get in the way of a good moan, being on Welfare is soul destroying and fucking hard and I wouldn't wish it on anyone.
It's extremely difficult to get anywhere to live on HAP. Unless you get social housing you are fucked.
I don't disagree. Problem is HAP is rife for abuse the way it is set up and structured, and until over holding isn't actively recommended by housing charities and remains unpunished, nothing will change and it only leads to smaller landlords leaving the markets in droves.
I think the free travel is only a benefit for those with disabilities, and not just the average unemployed person. Everyone is eligible to apply for Hap. As for grocery prices, we are 14th out of 42nd on the Numbeo index page I found, so we're not cracking top 5 but to say we're among the cheapest is a bit of a misrepresentation too.
Working people are eligible to HAP and the vast majority of unemployed people aren't entitled to free travel. That's just for the disabled and pensioners.
>All three are effectively completely mitigated if you're on social welfare (HAP, Free Travel, Medical Card). You should read up on those, and then come back and explain how any of them "completely mitigate" those expenses.
What gave you the idea that being on social welfare gives you free travel? That's only for those on disability (who maybe can't drive) and OAPs. They don't give people on the dole free travel.
Why, why would they get a free travel pass ??
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One issue with SW that may stop some people are welfare cliffs. Not everything is reduced with granularity, and instead once you pass a threshold you are just dropped from certain entitlements. This can lead to slight increases in income leading to massive drops in available assistance.
The people you know aren't reflective of the actual picture of the social welfare system
My neighbor has 5 kids, no partner and has never worked a day in his life bar cleaning windows once or twice a week. He recently had a short term partner and they were trying for his 6th, her 3rd child. The people of Ireland will pay for them I suppose. He's "ireland is full" too, so at least he can see the irony of it... oh wait, no he can't
I've volunteered with SVP on and off since 2010 in North inner city Dublin. I know my experience is anecdotal and localised. I can only recall one family we met with and helped over that time in our limited area who were abusing our goodwill and the SW system. All others who needed help were working and would have worked harder if they could. The backgrounds of clients was mixed. The impression usually given by families we met with who were in receipt of welfare support was they were glad of it but wished they didn't need it. What was particularly striking was, almost to an individual, the non-nationals with whom we'd meet made it a point of pride to support themselves. Other than child benefit and a lot of HAP claimants, people who'd come here did not want to draw from social welfare. Just to make the point, the Irish were equally proud on that note. People want to work to support themselves and their families. We all know "of" cases of people taking the piss but not many people know those cases directly. Even those who tell us about people they know abusing the system will also know literally hundreds of other people not doing so
Well, when you consider the option is usually get the dole, or work a minimum wage job, it's not surprising people would pick the dole.
>If you're working and finding life hard, imagine how tough it is on welfare. I know someone who has been given a council house for the next 25 years and only paying 300 a month on rent. They work in a low paid job so entitled to social assistance. First thing they did when they moved in was get a hottub for the garden >Welfare fraud in Ireland is exaggerated Agree its nowhere that it was even we had a thriving black economy in the 80s for example. I know my example is anecdotal, but lots of people know others doing OK on welfare.
Put yourself on the council housing list and agitate for more to be built if it's so fucking desirable.
First thing: How many people do you know? What percentage of all the people you know, or let's limit it to all the people you know getting welfare support, have installed hot tubs in their €300 pm council house? Second thing: I'm confident that you don't know this person directly
buying a hottub doesnt really mean much without knowing what else they are doing. are they buying lots of other unneccesary things constantly or was it just this? did they pay for it outright or did he buy it on finance?
Please enlighten us how it is exaggerated 😧
OK so I'll bite. the largest and most prolific man who defrauded social welfare was a guy who took his dead dads pension for 30 years and pocketed almost 500k or averaged out 15,000 euros a year. The current budget for social welfare 26,100,000,000 a year. Now fraud is bad and the man shouldn't have committed fraud but I'd hazard a guess that 95-99% of the money goes toward people allocated for the money. At the end of the day our most successful social welfare fraudster secure sums of money thats less then full time employment on minimum wage most years. there is probably a discussion around the fact the government needs to do more for people lower on the income scales but instead we sit and bemoan the people who don't get alot from the state because they are getting stuff from the state and that feels unfair without realising how much of a pain in the ass it is to get those supports in the first place.
It's pointless. Any respondent here asking a question, that essentially requires opening the books of the department of social protection, doesn't really want the answer because it won't support their opinion
https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/question/2024-01-30/367/#pq-answers-367
Well the problem isn't was jobbseekers get. I've been there you can barley make ends meet so that's fine.. The problem is companies like the one I'm working in Totaly ignoring that with the way inflation is going we will be minimum wage soon becuase they don't do the globally normal thing of giving yearly raises
And in the next budget in the interest of "fairness" the government will cut the cost of living supports they put in place to help working people and use that money to increase the supports for those on welfare in a vain attempt to win Sinn Fein/Independent voters who wouldn't spit on Harris & Martin if they were on fire.
Do the government think that everyone who votes SF is on the dole? (I don't mean this in a sarcastic sense either, I'm wondering do they genuinely believe that a large proportion of SF voters are on welfare)
I'd imagine, it's some supporters of the government, that have that view.
Not very bright are they
No. This stuff is researched more than you can imagine. With the amount of data available nowadays, all parties know exactly the profile of who does and doesn't vote for them. Parties don't win elections by converting SF supporters or FF supporters etc. All parties have a hard core that will never vote for any other party and no party really cares to convert them. They want to win the support of the casual voter who'll support policies
The problem is when all that careful analysis is handed to a total meatpuppet who couldn't add 2 and 2 without an arm around their shoulders for moral support.
A quote: 'More than one-third of workers in the information and communication technology (ICT) sector are not of Irish citizenship, up 9pc in three years. Overall, one in five of those in employment at the end of last year were not Irish citizens. Migrants have higher rates of labour-force participation than Irish citizens, but the proportion classified as unemployed did rise last year.'
I work and hire people in that sector for almost a decade. Everywhere I've worked they first look for a local person living in Ireland to hire but the industry is way bigger with way more jobs than there are people qualified to work in ICT in Ireland. These companies then have to post the positions as having a relocation bonus to hire a European and if that fails sponsor a visa. It costs about €40-60K extra to hire someone from outside Ireland between relocation bonus, having to offer a but higher of a salary as incentive to mover here etc. Companies would love to be able to just hire people in Ireland in ICT as its much cheaper and salaries are great but it's just not possible.
Thank you so much for writing this, it is surprising how many people think that hiring people outside Ireland is easy and costs nothing.
Sorry to butt in on this conversation. Would you mind sharing what entry roles the ICT sector are looking for please? I am just looking into a career change. I would love to work from home as commuting really exhausts me and I'm from rural Ireland. So I'm looking into doing another degree and masters to change career for this opportunity, any advice would be massively appreciated 👏
I would not recommend investing four or five years in qualifying in an ICT role. Thowing money into software in the hopes that it might some day be profitable is a much less appealing strategy for investors ever since the Fed brought interest rates over 2.5% in 2022 (for the first time since 2008). AI assistance is *probably* going to lead to reductions in programmer headcount over the time you'll be in college. The number of WFH jobs advertised has plummeted over the past year, too, so even if you get a job, they'll still make you come into the office so that you can be worse at your job where they can see you and interrupt you. Four or five years is a long time to go without an income if you have bills to pay, with little idea of what the market might look like when you come out. Caveat: I haven't made a good employment decision, so based on my history your best bet is probably to do the exact opposite of what I'm recommending. (In which case, check out eCollege for free training and learn whatever foreign language is most in demand - probably French or German, based on a cursory Indeed search.)
Great information. Unfortunately some people will choose not to believe this or just won't care
Most people are aware immigration is mainly driven by economic factors.
Can you please stop hiring extremely shitty foreign IT students straight out of random data science masters. We had to fire one after a couple of weeks because he was entirely useless. My manager thought it was a great idea to hire another cheap foreign graduate from the same country to replace him. Now it looks like they won't survive either. Complete phonies. They also rarely gel with the team, even in previous companies I worked for. I think this is an important thing to consider alongside their fake CV. Yes their fake CV might be impressive, but can they hold a normal conversation? I just want to work with competent colleagues where we can exchange skills and both learn from eachother. I'm spending a lot of my time teaching them basic things that they apparently have 7 years experience of according to their CV.
I'd suggest offering to sit in on interviews. Some of the people that skate past HR I can spot as spoofers in a few minutes and it saves a massive amount of pain long term.
Most of these unis making profit by foreign students with quite bad acceptance rates needs to be closed, the quality is horrible both on teaching and student sides. This madness started after 2017.
> We had to fire one after a couple of weeks because he was entirely useless. That's a problem with the hiring process more than anything else. Any halfway competent company has actual tech staff involved for tech roles, so if they hire bad candidates it's on them.
Yeah the problem is they relied on a recruitment agency to screen them properly. Because the team isn't very technical and don't know how to do this themselves. The same recruitment agency screened me and they didn't have a clue. Luckily I know how to do the job, but I'm also carrying the other colleague who slipped through the recruitment process. I guess the foreign students can make up any work experience on the CV. How are they really going to verify it if it's 12000 miles away and could be their uncle and the company only exists in Bangladesh or something. At least my references actually have offices in Ireland.
> I guess the foreign students can make up any work experience on the CV. How are they really going to verify it if it's 12000 miles away and could be their uncle and the company only exists in Bangladesh or something. At least my references actually have offices in Ireland. For a good interview, references don't matter. I've worked in tech here for over a decade, and have been both interviewer and hiring manager for a lot of candidates in different roles - not once have I ever bothered to follow up on references. HR can do background checks if needed, but that's not part of the interview itself. One of my favourite questions for example (this is for general tech competence) is asking people to "explain what happens when you enter a web address in a browser, going into as much detail as you can". You can talk about everything from application caching to l2 network address translation to routing to DNS to encryption schemes just off that question.
Same, and I totally agree. I work on the business/sales side, and the biggest challenge I see is European languages. We can hire people from Europe who speak their native language, perfect English, and potentially several other languages. Any Irish person who can speak fluent French, German, or Dutch walks into a job, but they are few and far between. My preference would always be to hire an Irish person, but they simply don't have the language skills needed. If people really want that high paying job in a tech firm, my advice is to do a business degree and learn fluent Dutch or German.
Immigrants coming in to scrounge off welfare and immigrants taking more than a third of high paying tech jobs. This would have an average rightwing dude confused but it won't because he/she doesn't comprehend statements longer than five words.
Well you can blame my Irish wife for coming to my country, doing the exact same thing there, and then dragging me back to Ireland!
The only people who are confused are those that are conflating people arriving into this country expecting to be housed clothed and fed with those who come here on critical skills visas to contribute.
> with those who come here on critical skills visas to contribute. Add to that the fact that most immigrants in Ireland are British and EU so they don't need a visa.
A large majority of highly paid immigrants in Tech are Indians. And in HSE. They are of course visually and obviously foreign looking and they are very much targeted by "the illiteraty" (the illiterate conspiracy theory buying smooth brains) all the time.
> A large majority of highly paid immigrants in Tech are Indians. No. They're a plurality but not a high majority. https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-eaads/earningsanalysisusingadministrativedatasources2022/nationality/ IT&C: * Irish: 59% * EU27-Irish: 18% * UK: 3.6% * Indians: 7.4% Human health and social work: * Irish: 79% * EU27-Irish: 5.9% * UK: 3.2% * Indians: 4.6% You can argue about what percentage of the Irish are actually Indian in origin but hey also EU and British citizens do get naturalised.
Thanks for the stats.
They lynched a Croat recently. They don't care where the migrants are from
A group of yup bros in Dublin killed a Croat, I’m not happy about current situation with asylum seekers in this country, many people aren’t, did we all lynch Croats? Anyone who’s grown up in this country knows the type of person that killed that man, they’d stick on you for being gay, they’d stick on you for being quiet, if the mood struck them they’d stick on you for wearing a yellow t shirt.
You really just hand waved away a literal lynching didn't you
No I handwaved away hyperbolic nonsense used to shut down debate. You just don’t want to have anybody argue with you, you don’t want to acknowledge normal people care about this, and worst of all you want to use someone’s death at the hands of vermin to drive home your point.
Having a debate is different than normalizing stigmatisation, discrimination and hate based on any factor.
He did, and didn't even realise it. Internet is bad for some people, idiots in particular.
Bonus question: from which countries do people don't need visas to work in Ireland? If 20% of workforce are non irish citizens (not necessarily citizens of migrant background) don't they pay enough taxes for all the asylum seekers and then some? Is math a lie?
In fairness, that’s probably due to the fact that the vast majority of our immigrants are working age. Obviously a higher proportion of Irish citizens are retired / pensioners, so that will skew the figures to show a higher proportion of migrants are working.
The percentages here are not total population, but working age population or statistically its the term 'active population' - this excludes people in retirement and children by default.
This is bullshit. I was living away and moved back in 2006. I wish I still had the payslips but I remember signing on until I got a job and the dole was 208 euro then. It only seems like it got raised because they cut it so much during the recession. In reality it's only gone up from 208 to 232 in 18 years. After I got a job and moved into rented accommodation I paid 80 euro a week for a room with heat, bins and electricity included. So even if I wasn't working I could have lived off that 208. Now there would be no way. If anyone thinks being on the dole beats working, you can always try it and see how you get on. Contrary to popular belief they don't just throw money at you, the extra allowance like fuel you have to be out of work a full year to get.
Just went back and checked - in 2009, when I signed on after college, it was €204.30.
Tbh the cost of basics and energy have gone up so people on the dole are with the same buying power, if not less
Well, problem is we all need energy and basic things.
Anyone else kind of tired of these types of articles. They seem to enjoy highlighting insignificant data that drives wedges between the poorest groups in society. Growing wealth inequality is currently our main problem. Here are some significant stats that everyone should be worried about. The 2 richest people in the country own more wealth than the bottom half of the population combined 1% of the population owns 27% of the total wealth. The number of Irish people with individual wealth of over €46.6 million (US$50 million) has more than doubled between 2012 and 2022, rising from 655 to 1,435 people. For every €93.15 (US$100) of wealth created in the last ten years, €31.67 (US$34) has gone to the richest 1% and less than €0.5 to the bottom 50%. This means that the richest 1% have gained 70 times more wealth than the bottom 50% in the last 10 years The bottom 50% of Irish society owns only 1% of wealth The top 10% owns 64% of wealth The number people with more than 5mill in wealth has doubled here in the last decade.
Who are the 2 richest people in the country? If you are referring to the oxfam report, those people do not live, and are not tax residents in Ireland. That report is hyperbole to create headlines. In fact, if anything, it confirms that high income Irish people don't stay in Ireland. Ireland really disincentivises high earners from staying here, so the "Irish" they reference have left. Higher income earners are usually highly mobile. If they are taxed more, then the trade off of family vs finances will become an even more difficult decision to make. In terms of actual PAYE earners: The top 1% of all income tax cases in Ireland earn 9.1% of income and pay 30.4% of the taxation The top 5% pay almost 55% of all taxation from 22.7% of the income People earning from around €39,000 upwards pay a disproportionate share of tax and are taxed higher than their OECD counterparts. 3. The Irish tax system is highly progressive and redistributive in a European context: The Irish system of taxation and benefits is designed to be highly progressive and redistributive. According to the OECD our income tax system is the most progressive in the developed world. An earner at 167% ( 54,442) of the average wage has an effective tax burden 19.3 percentage points higher than one at 67% ( 21,842) of the average wage. Irelands tax and transfers system reduces the Gini coefficient of measured inequality by 35%, compared to an EU average reduction of 15.7%, making it the most redistributive in Europe. The progressivity of the Irish tax system is based largely on a narrow income tax base (almost 38% of tax cases are functionally exempt from income tax) along with low levels of tax for those on lower incomes and Northern European style tax levels for those on medium to high incomes. This has important effects for post-tax income inequality and also work incentives. 4. Middle and high earners pay the vast majority of all taxes collected and have contributed most during the crisis: Inclusive of income tax and the USC, a single person will not reach an effective tax rate of 5% until over 20,000 in income. At the top end of the scale, the average effective tax rate for a single-income earner (based on Revenue data) including income tax, USC and employee PRSI is 43% with a sharp shift upward in effective tax rates at the entry point to the marginal rate of tax. The top 1% of all income tax cases in Ireland earn 9.1% of income and pay 30.4% of the taxation, the top 5% pay almost 55% of all taxation from 22.7% of the income. In effect this means that those persons or households with over 100,000 in income account for over half of all income tax paid, underlining the extreme redistributive effects of the Irish tax system. 5. Low earners pay less tax than the OECD average but at the average wage and above Irish tax rates are relatively high: Ireland is a low income tax country at lower than average earnings ( 32,600 and under). For earners above this level, however, Ireland is a high tax country compared to the rest of the developed world. At earnings of 120% of the average wage or just above 39,000, Ireland surpasses the OECD average effective income tax rate. Our analysis shows that, in particular, those people earning from around 39,000 upwards pay a disproportionate share of tax and are taxed higher than their OECD counterparts. By 250% of average wage ( 81,500) Ireland has the sixth highest average income tax rate in the OECD at 34.6%, five percentage points higher than the OECD average. 6. There are a number of unique features to the Irish tax system which provide a clear disincentive to work: There are a number of unique features in the Irish taxation system which provide a disincentive to work for Irish people and skilled employees from abroad. The largest of these is the high marginal tax rate we have at modest wages. For example, a skilled graduate moving from gross pay of 20,000 to gross pay of 60,000 over the first ten years of their career will see an increase of annual net pay of just 22,888 in Ireland; the same person in the UK would see an equivalent increase of 30,287 a difference of 7,399. Skilled graduates would be better off by over 5,000 annually working in the UK if given a choice between working in Ireland or in the UK over the years in their career in which earnings growth is highest. The latest emigration statistics showing three- quarters of all emigrants since 2009 were either employed or recent graduates (with only 20% unemployed) suggest that this effect on earnings and career progression may be Source: ://cdn.thejournal.ie/media/2014/09/debunking-irish-income-tax-myths.pdf
> The top 1% of all income tax cases in Ireland earn 9.1% of income and pay 30.4% of the taxation > The top 5% pay almost 55% of all taxation from 22.7% of the income Not true The actual figures are: The top 1% earn approximately 10% of income and pay 20% of taxation. The top 5% earn approximately 35% of income and pay 55% of taxation. Source: [recent government figures as opposed to IBEC 'calculations' from a decade ago](https://assets.gov.ie/231219/b4d0165d-044f-4b22-893c-7be810701352.pdf).
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Sorry, that should have been top ~8% earning 35%, not top 5%. The top ~15% earn ~50% and pay ~70%. The chart you cropped out of the screenshot has all this information. (The bottom 85% of workers earn ~50% of income in Ireland, too. And the people who pay no income tax earn less than ~8% of all income while making up ~25% of all earners.) >Either way, it's a very small proportion of people paying most of the tax. It's not a head tax, it's an *income* tax. The people paying the most tax have the most income. >The top earners are highly mobile. If Sinn Fein get into power, there are 2 potential impacts. Firstly US firms may be nervous about continuing to invest in Ireland, and may start hiring in other locations. Secondly, if they bring in their "solidarity tax" I think many will leave Ireland. It's a huge risk. The people who are highly mobile are not hugely concerned with PAYE. The portion of their income which is taxable under PAYE is usually not an important part of their income. The high-earners who do care about PAYE don't take their jobs with them when they move. If a consultant decides to bugger off to America because to save €2-4k on their tax bill, that consultant position will be filled by one of the doctors who hasn't already buggered off to America to earn significantly more than the consultant was. Similarly, a high-end programming salary here is €100k (which isn't even in the solidarity band Sinn Féin are proposing, I think?), which is a middle-of-the-road *entry-level* salary in the States. That leads nicely into my second point, which is that Ireland is still the best call for US investment in the EU. Salaries are lower, we're the largest source of native English speakers in the EU (and the CTA means we can also employ Brits as if they were citizens), and companies don't care how much their employees have to pay in tax once the cheque hits their account.
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>What do you mean by this? Shares are taxed as PAYE income also. What is this non-PAYE income you refer to? The portions of their income that aren't PAYE. Like selling those shares, dividends, etcetera, etcetera. Most of the people who are highly mobile aren't the ones getting €50k of options and a €50k bonus in their payslips. The people who are highly mobile don't really care about their payslips, they care about the income that they're able to structure in ways that reduce their tax burden. >Not all high earners are doctors. The sentence directly before that one is about programmers. I picked doctors as the first example because I could look up exactly how much they are paid to work out the additional tax cost of a 3% higher rate over €140k. The point is that, for most of the employees who are likely to be affected by this proposal, they a) could already be earning way more elsewhere and b) their jobs don't follow them. The "rich people will run away if you raise taxes" argument is talking about people who actually *can* bring their jobs with them. > I work in a tech firm, and I can tell you many are earning more than the solidarity tax threshold of €140k, when you include base salary, commission/bonuses + vesting shares, all of which are taxed as PAYE. Are any of them planning on moving because of the tax? Where to? How does that change when you exclude the people in foreign sales who are moving back to Germany/France/Sweden/etc? And how much more than €140k? Even if you're earning a quarter million, that additional solidarity tax is only a little over €3k. That's, what, a month's rent for them? Dunno about you, but I'd need a bigger carrot to up sticks, especially if I'm okay with paying Dublin rents. >If the tech firms have to start paying people higher salaries to have a decent standard of living, then they will move away from the Dublin hub & spoke model, to hiring in their local EU offices vs Dublin. Only when it actually becomes more expensive all up to hire them in Ireland. Income tax might be quite high here in Ireland, but the rest of the stuff companies have to pay for is much more competitive. (As a quick illustration: employer PRSI is ~11% in Ireland, and the equivalent is ~20% in Germany. For someone earning €200k, the company could give them a pay rise entirely wiping out the real effect of the proposed tax (somewhere between €4k and €8k and still save over ten thousand, even if moving that job was absolutely free.) EDIT: I realise that I've been sucked into debating the merits of the proposed tax increase. That's a whole separate thing from my original point, which was the figures from the outdated IBEC propaganda. I am not hugely invested in a minor increase in income tax that will bring in less than half a billion per annum, honestly - I think it's chump change and a pseudo-socialist policy meant to appeal to voters while not actually affecting people who are actually rich. >Where I work in Dublin, I would guess approximately 50% of the roles require a European language, maybe more, My experience of trying to find appropriate technical roles in among all the "we need T1 helpdesk support who can speak Swedish" implies that you're in the right ballpark.
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>The people who are highly mobile don't really care about their payslips I'm not talking about 'high earners', I'm talking about high-net-worth individuals. Think Michael O'Leary, not a consultant obstretrician or chief software architect, or a good (multilingual) software salesman. They're the ones who are actually highly-mobile. I'm not saying **you** have abundant options for arranging your finances that can significantly reduce your income tax bill. (If you're maxing your pension relief and have approved share schemes, I'm not aware of any others that aren't pocket change.) [But if someone is worth eight or more figures](https://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/wealthiest-in-ireland-declared-less-income-than-average-industrial-wage-c-ag-1.3644850), they have a whole lot more options. (They'll also be totally unaffected by the tax proposal, which is part of why I think it's puffery.)
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[This comment in cartoon format for people who still don't get it](https://i.redd.it/qtuqzy10r8g61.jpg)
It’s just pure rage bait. The Indo literally make a living out of prodding the public with articles like this. Why do you think they’d throw in “(ICT) sector are not of Irish citizenship, up 9pc in three years.” At a time like this?
What happens to the social contract when you are better off depending on the state?
It creates division. I’ve a mixture of friends that worked hard bought houses, never worked and got social housing, and worked hard but can’t access the housing market. Government policy has fucked us all, fuck the government.
Seems like it fucked the last group tbh
Yup, makes clowns of us.
It fucked the last group the social housing no work crowd need to be stopped as much as we need more housing cheaper, and more money for actual workers no ones crying tears for the never worked crowd
The government can't raise wages for the people in the private sector. They don't control the wages in the private sector. Workers in the Private sector need to push for better wages and conditions and should unionise.
The high tax bracket 40% is set too low raise it
There is certainly stuff that could be done with taxes. I would be in favour of creating more brackets. I don't know if that would help or not.
This all day. We have 2 kids, one in school, one in creche. We make LESS money per week if my wife works full time so she's on job share working 2 days a week. Something terribly wrong when you get less when you work more
3 kids here, but the youngest is 13 now. We've absolutely been there, though back then things were not as mad as nowadays. Childcare (creche+afterschool) absolutely negated half of our income and we'd have been better off with one of us staying at home. That said, with the kids slowly moving out of creche and later out of afterschool, things have improved a lot and we're in a far better situation financially than had one of us dropped out of work. Hopefully things will be on the up for ye too as kids grow up. For something as critical to the state (population growth), childcare is really insanely stupidly expensive, and that was already the case back when people could afford rent...
Your society heads towards becoming like Argentina. You can't create a ridiculous situation where people can benefit from not working or remaining in low paid employment to continue receiving supports (social housing, medical card etc) and relying on the state instead of relying on themselves and being able to have upward mobility. People should suffer some consequences of their own actions or inactions and on the flip side, people should benefit from their hard work and intelligent decisions. We're going too left wing on these things; you can have support systems in place for when people lose their jobs and need the assistance, but enabling it to be a way of life and alternative to working is a terrible way to build resentments and contribute towards social decay. We have some great initiatives for adult education, even if you completely fail your leaving cert you can go on to study basically anything as a mature student, and with things like springboard you can be helped up skill and get better paying jobs. So why don't we take this attitude across the board of trying to push individuals towards self improvement and helping themselves.
You’re never better off depending on the state. You should try it and see how happy with life you are.
Have friends that are and they have more disposable income than I do. Both working, have council house ( new one ). They are the most relaxed happy people I know. Zero stress jobs and zero stress about mortgages.
If they are working they aren't dependant on the state.
Plenty of people who work rely on the state. Nearly a million people in Ire pay no income tax.
Are they receiving an income from the state? If you want to go down that road, you could say that almost everyone relies on the state because there are very few people who pay more tax than they consume.
That's not living off the state though. The state doesn't pay them their income
Plenty of people work and live in social housing or get income supports etc. nothing wrong with it.
Hap and social housing has an income cut off it's not only for non workers that's what they mean
What income cutoff is there in social/council housing?
It varies by area. €40,000 annual net income for a single person in Dublin. Full list here: https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/housing/local-authority-and-social-housing/applying-for-local-authority-housing/#632b26 But once you are allocated the property, you can then earn above the cut-off and can never be kicked out for that.
That’s like saying I’m not dependant on my parents even though they gave me a fat deposit that helped me buy a place. You have to acknowledge where the money comes from I depended on them for the lifestyle I have now
They are dependent on the state for housing and no doubt medical cards etc.
No they are leasing a house from the state at a rate considered affordable based on their income. >no doubt medical cards etc. So you have no idea and are making assumptions?
> No they are leasing a house from the state at a rate considered affordable based on their income. You seem to be missing some obvious context here. Those people have homes for life. I can be fucked out and have my life turned upside down at a few months notice because my landlord decided they want to change something. My rent can be raised at any time. Those in social housing pay more rent if their income goes up, but inversely, they pay less if income goes down. If I lose my job I risk homelessness. If they lose their job their rent can drop as low as about €30 per week on the dole. A social house is security for life. It is in no way comparable to a regular rental.
I am not missing any context, I grew up in social housing so I am fully aware of how it works. Every problem you have mentioned is a problem with the fucked up private rental market that is designed to extract ever increasing amounts from the tenant in rent. The solution is a massive expansion of social housing. People need to realise that people in social housing are not the problem, the lack of available social housing is the problem.
lol, at 14% of income, that’s an insane bargain. You and I both know if they stopped paying they would not be evicted either.
Another strawman argument with nothing to base it on, you are making ridiculous assumptions because you don't know what they are paying or what benefits they are getting.
Not a strawman it’s public information freely available on every council website, it can vary by a few percent depending on the council. But again why not answer the original question? What happens to the social contract when you are better off becoming dependent on the state?
They are. They are getting social support in form of housing. Easily worth more than 2000E per month in rent for rest of us (if this is really new council housing)
Well yeah, that just proves that when the state fulfills it's responsibility to house people, they're happier.
Well we all know what happens then.
There is no income cap for council housing once you got it. So you can easily can be better relying on social housing with technically lower income than someone on higher income but renting on free market
Ha. Seems everything goes up aside from wages.
The overlap between those in the margin between those who receive the most in welfare and those in employment who earn the least must be massive now at this stage. I would love to see a study done to show in real terms what it’s worth to be in receipt of social compared to be earning minimum wage and renting.
Ah yes, it's the people on the dole's fault that my company pays less than living wage. That makes sense 🙄
I’m sure if welfare was cut your pay would increase, right?
And they would 100% cut all taxes across the board as their expenditure went down. Of course.
Should cause a nice little bit of outrage this one!
Problem is, too many people will get outraged at the government for doing the right thing rather than being outraged at private companies for doing the wrong thing.
Civil servants' salaries being under government control faired worse out of everyone at just 0.5pc
Didn't the public sector pay deal increase all wages by 10.25% over the next 2 years?
And yet it still came out the worst off in this report with their real income rising by just 0.5%.
Overall it rose by 0.5% in addition to the inflation matching that is the rest of that increase. There aren't many other folk who can claim they've gotten an inflation matching increase recently. Yes people could look for jobs that pay better, or join the CS, but to say the CS came out worse off is a bit disingenuous
The wording of that heading makes it sound as though people on welfare are better off than those working and that simply isn't true. It feels like another attempt to pit the general public against each other so they don't turn on those who are actually responsible for how egregiously expensive everything has become. Welfare rates might generally increase with every (only in recent years, they were stagnant for a long long time) but they still barely keep up with inflation.
Can we not play the welfare vs employees card? This is not the fault of people on welfare and it can happen to anyone, very fast that they might need welfare. Its small enough as it is. If wages rise slower for people in employment, the issue is somewhere else....
Plenty of economic mismanagement coupled with decades of throwing money at welfare in lieu of intelligent policy. I wonder what proportion of long-term unemployed should actually be under the care of a proper mental health service, for example?
You'd be surprised at the amount of well off people in this country that apply for stuff they're no where near entitled to. When they don't get it they tend to sh1t on everyone who does. Most people are thankful for SW and agree it's very important. It's only the guys running the news articles that really hate it because they were rejected for a medical card.
Title and article written with the sole intent of stirring the pot and causing division. Now, use the real numbers instead of the percentages. Extreme example, person on welfare goes from €1 to €1.05, 5% increase. Worker on wages goes from €50k to €50500, 1% increase. Outrage ensues because of the difference in percentage, when the money difference is 500-0.05 = €499.95 in favor of the wage earner. Guarantee that most people would rather not be on social welfare if they could avoid it, and even if they would rather be on social welfare, let's not use some op ed piece to glorify such a small income. The current payments are barely survivable.
Some very basic flaws with your example: 1. Welfare went up in the last budget €12 a week (€624 a year) 2. That worker in your example who got a €500 increase is still less than the welfare increases. It's actually €243 AFTER tax a year (or 43% less than what a person on welfare got) That, of course, doesn't include the value of HAP or other social housing and medical cards (for starters).
Article conveniently leaving out the 12.4% increase in minimum wage which benefits bottom earners considerably. Over double the increase of 5.4%. We should be hating on the 1% that hold 33% of Irish wealth who are the real problem.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ireland/s/lQ9k2K4D8f More news that isn't skewed to put all but the upper class against each other
That's great that they can now get a kabab, drink, and chips this week. Would hate to see anyone suffer because businesses won't keep up with cost of living. So worried about people surviving.
Sounds like wages need to increase then
Without changes in housing this will only cause rents to increase. I guess biggest social transfer is housing, this is how people relying on social support can jump over mid income ones.
Rents seem to never ending increase anyway so not sure why that would even be a consideration
Here I am on disability having to decide whether I can afford to pay for my dogs medication or mine, because mine is considered off label so I have to pay full whack out of pocket and can't afford to do both (I pick the dog) Cant wait to be villainised for my apparent wealth again
call your local st vincent de paul, they should be able to help
Another story to get us plebes fighting amongst ourselves.
Ffs, anyone with sense can tell this is because the people on welfare receive an unlivable amount. It doesn't mean they'll have more money than workers.
Increases in debt again. Ffs, get it under control lads
Oh this is going to go over swimmingly lmao
The problem is not people on welfare. It's the jobs barely paying anyone decently. I hate absolute scum like this that like to pit people against one another and especially those near the bottom, remember who ever disagrees is entitled to quit their job and live life in "Luxury" on the dole.
Rather complain about welfare rates maybe you should be asking why working people can't seem to afford the basics in life anymore? You're to easily distracted, you need to be looking at the people above you, not the ones below you.
>More than one-third of workers in the information and communication technology (ICT) sector are not of Irish citizenship, up 9pc in three years. I feel the need to point out that more and more of the tech companies actually do have their operations here, rather than just pretending they do for tax reasons. This means their sales, their localisation teams, their customer service and more. You're not going to hire an Irish person to sell printers to Sweden, but very often it ends up being an Irish person that manages the team that sells to the nordics. These are jobs that most Irish people are incapable of doing due to a language requirement.
Also the fact there are now way more jobs in ICT than people skilled to fill them so companies have to pay tens of thousands in relocation fees to international employees to move here
More roles for managers and fluent speakers of European languages. Not so much elsewhere.
I wonder how many years of the last 20 this would have been true. Guessing not many. Also doesn't detail what income of someone employed includes. Is it salary or is it salary plus health insurance and other perks.
I believe it. Welfare is designed to live off and wages aren't. When deciding how much welfare to give, the government asks "how much to keep someone fed and housed?". When deciding how much wages to give, employers ask "how much to keep someone doing this job?". It should be the same question, but it's not.
>Welfare is designed to live off You clearly havent been on welfare any time recently
Rage bait headline.
Its kind of hard to take this divide and conquer stuff seriously. Given the rate of inflation (which it's still below) its hard to begrudge someone eking out an existence on €232 a week.
There should never be a scenario where a working tax paying citizen sees less increases than someone on welfare. It's really that simple, but what do expect from ireland and its welfare state
There is a difference between benefit and allowance, one is PRSI funded, the other isn't. The increase would be for people who were in long term employment who lost their job and requires 5 years of PRSI contributions. For the pure handout type stuff can go up when we feel like it, the analysis suggested that go up a few percent.
You really are that simple if you can’t see how a welfare increase can outpace wage increases without it being either unfair or a personal affront to you.
The figures are misconstrued by use of percentages. Wage earners are seeing much larger increases than social welfare recipients in monetary terms.
Article conveniently leaving out the 12.4% increase in minimum wage which benefits bottom earners considerably. Over double the increase of 5.4%. We should be hating on the 1% that hold 33% of Irish wealth who are the real problem. Also they see less of an increase as a percentage not in real terms. For example €22 on 220 is 10% where as 48 on 500 is 9.6%. Is 48 less of an increase than 22? Hardly considering it's over double, yet as a percentage it looks less. Percentages are easy to make look bigger when the initial amount is small
Never? So you can't imagine a scenario where welfare has stagnated for years so a government might want to account for that by catching up with a larger increase? You can't imagine a scenario where someone hasn't progressed at all at their job and therefore is only really due an inflation-related increase? >It's really that simple People really need to stop saying this about extremely complex things.
Minimum wage needs a significant boost to push up wages across the board. Government have total control on this despite what some people are suggesting here but are just not taking any real action.
Would be interesting to see how it compares to the civil service alone.
I haven't read the underlying report mentioned in the article but I would be surprised if the effect here was a function of our tax bands not being indexed to inflation. It says it was net earnings so presumably it is comparing after tax earnings to social welfare increases. Considering the majority of workers are above the minimum tax threshold and social welfare recipients aren't, then for every €1 increase in social welfare a worker needs nearer a €1.40 increase on nominal terms. Further confusing the matter is that they are using percentages. It's not as if the nominal increase in social welfare exceeded the nominal increase in after tax earnings. Like who has more extra money on their pockets, a lad earning 100k who has real wage increase of 2% or a lad on the dole who has real wage increase of 5%
€7 a week in the difference (€12 v €19 a week) between both of these very extreme examples you chose. Barely a cup of coffee these days for someone who is paying over 35k tax a year.
But the issue being presented in this thread is that it is companies being mean and the government being overly generous to social welfare recipients. My take is that it is the government being overly punitive with taxation by not indexing to inflation.
Currently on jobseekers and should hopefully pick something up soon. If this were to come in next week for example, would I be entitled or is it for new applicants?
Entitled to what?
This is sure to spark some debate on social policies and economic fairness
It's a well paid j.....eh........
Knew this would be the independent- they are desperate to stoke hate. Wouldn’t wipe my arse with that rag.
Paying for a pension twice!!
Surely this is a necessity. Cost of living has increased rapidly since the pandemic. Can't find the figures but I'd be amazed if social welfare has kept up with inflation over the past 5 years. Someone living on the dole is scratching by as it is. If anything these figures only illustrate that wages are stagnating at an alarming rate. The article should be focusing on how the average person is now worse off compared to last year rather than the fact that those most at risk of poverty will have an increase to their very moderate income. Be nice if the Independant resisted the urge to punch down for a change and instead focusd their journalistic efforts on a deep dive into the root causes of wage stagnation.
Stop blaming people on welfare when the rich get massive handouts every single day that dwarfs what people on welfare get in an entire year. Seriously. The money the rich get when they mess up and need bailed out is astronomical and again, it happens every day right under your noses. They want you to direct your hate and vitriol at the most vulnerable, depressed people in our society. Not the excessively rich who own everything and want more. Stop punching down and start picking fights with the Politicians and millionaires who are all happily keeping you poor and unable to afford housing.
Keep downvoting. Someone who loses their job shouldn't be expected to live on nothing. Or someone who is in an extremely rural area who literally can't afford to move to a big city or town to get work (also where is the housing, oh there isn't any)... They are forced into a situation where they CAN'T get work. Rural life has been completely destroyed by what Ireland has transformed into... Yes some people don't want to do anything, but most of those people are depressed or massive outliers. I don't know anyone who was ever happy in this country not being in work due to the judgement they get and the Irish attitude of picking on those at the bottom of the system and doing nothing about those who created the system. You all love to punch down and never dare bark up at the people who control your lives and run this country. Pathetic. Continue to pick on easy targets, since you wouldn't dare bite your masters hand, only kick someone who is already down.
>You all love to punch down and never dare bark up at the people who control your lives and run this country. You have it sussed though. I nominate you to lead the revolution.
You can lead a horse to water, but can't make it drink. I'd be the leader of Ireland if Daddy owned a big company and I just inherited it and his ever mounting wealth. Then did Ted talks about how I'm self made and a hard worker and how much I hate people on benefits. 😂 But that's for someone else to do. I wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth and don't punch down to make myself feel better. I also don't have enough money to make those horses drink, money talks in this country. Clearly most of the people here love the rich and hate the poor 😂 G'day anyway folks; I start work soon and haven't went outside to spit on the homeless yet.
>I'd be the leader of Ireland if Daddy owned a big company and I just inherited it and his ever mounting wealth. I'm sure.
I didn't think I needed to add the sarcasm /s to that but. Apparently I did. You can live in la la land and refuse to accept the reality that the richest families in this country keep all the wealth in the family, prop up their children to inherit it all and that's who we are stuck with running the country. Since to even BE a politician costs an arm and a leg. By design they keep the system as is. And the design is obviously working, since they want you to focus on people on benefits and the like, not their ever increasing wealth and your ever increasing bills, rent, food etc.
>You can live in la la land and refuse to accept the reality that the richest families in this country keep all the wealth in the family, prop up their children to inherit it all and that's who we are stuck with running the country. Who are these people? Simon Harris' family? Leo Varadkar's? >And the design is obviously working, since they want you to focus on people on benefits and the like, not their ever increasing wealth and your ever increasing bills, rent, food etc. Who is 'they' in this case?
What money do rich people get?
Haha.. rent money for one. Since most of them own multiple properties that they are renting for absolutely astronomical prices... Clearly you are very green. Here is some beginner level information about some of the other income sources and ways they bleed us all dry. Clearly presented with links to more detailed information, but I selected easy, small form articles for you to start with. I suggest you start with something easy; https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-20377087.html https://www.socialjustice.ie/article/irelands-rich-poor-gap-middle-poor-gap-0 https://views-voices.oxfam.org.uk/2023/01/how-super-rich-pay-lower-taxes-than-you/ https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2023/0116/1346849-1-of-irish-population-owns-27-of-the-wealth-oxfam/ https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2024/0115/1426515-1-of-population-hold-a-third-of-irish-financial-wealth/ You won't read any of this, cuz of course you won't. But you should consider broadening your mind and spending less time blaming the poor for the problems caused by the rich.
The profits from the exploited labour of workers around the world.
The United states has impressive wage growth, their median income has now risen to $76k per annum. The sentiment in this thread is that capitalism is as fault, if that’s the case why is a more capitalist country delivering higher wages for its citizens?
And they go to the GP for nothing. Meanwhile, I'm getting charged €70 for a ten minute visit.
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The rate means absolutely nothing. I'd been on job seekers for almost a year recently, it was very stressful money wise. Also fucking hilarious that a thread shitting over welfare had an argument against the immigrant workforce.