The benefits racket has come to dominate the national scene after the revelations of the past days.
The accent is on the people who benefited by what looks like a well-honed scheme for them to get €450 a month. It would seem the scheme was so well organised it was quite easy for the investigators to get proof and hence convictions. How these people are going to get the money to pay back is another matter.
I find it all rather hypocritical. We all know the benefits system was riddled. We all know the Customer Care system has come to mean helping people who do not qualify to get into this or that scheme.
Every political candidate will tell you that is what those who attend the surgeries, ie the candidate offices, and actually what those who meet them at any of the mammoth free parties before the election want to tell them.
This one wants a house even if they already have one or a job even if they already have one or a promotion even if they do not merit one.
In short, customer care has come to mean giving people what they should not have.
The Nationalists did not get this right. In people’s minds they just did not bother. Or were even hopeless at it. Or maybe they did not want to break the law.
Labour, on the contrary, went an extra mile. And by far, they gave people what they wanted. After which there were no more jobs to give, or houses, or whatever. In the army so many demanded promotions or claimed abuse in their respect that mass promotions were given out up till the very day of elections.
So for people to now claim surprise at what is being called the benefits scam is mightily hypocritical. We always knew fiddles were the order of the day, although we may not have known the details.
The country now has a clear choice – either keep investigating this scam till the very end, not stopping at the miserables who got €450 a month, but also roping in those who created the scam and also those who operated it. Or do deep surgery on this customer care system which has become (or maybe it has always been like that) a byword for cutting corners and giving people what they had no right to.
Corruption has become institutionalised and we only pay lip-service to the system of justice. Then the poor pay and the rich continue amassing riches or money or property or whatever. And importantly, as the prime minister has rushed to point out, no sitting MP had a hand in the scam. While people are still claiming they were pointed in the direction of the scam by ‘someone’ from Customer Care, only they can’t remember the name.
Meanwhile, as I keep repeating week after week, the country has accumulated €9.4 billion in public debt and the minister of finance seems unable to stop the haemorrhage, and the millionaire packages and the select few gorging themselves ‘because everybody’s doing it’ and the people charged with selling our hospitals for free continue to walk free.
That’s right – go after those who got €450 a month after claiming epilepsy or mental breakdown or whatever.
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