Taoiseach Leo Varadkar walked himself into a bit of a storm on Wednesday when he responded to a question from Paul Murphy regarding the film I, Daniel Blake with a reference to the Channel 4 documentary Benefits Street.
I, Daniel Blake is about a man who has his social welfare allowance cut off because he is deemed fit to work despite having had a heart attack. Benefits Street is a documentary about a group of people in Birmingham who have managed to become lifelong welfare dependents while engaged in fraud, drug dealing, drug taking and shoplifting.
I have seen neither and the fact that the film was directed by Ken Loach will not tempt me to watch it. Varadkar countered Murphy’s claim that the movie shows what will happen when the state changes welfare rules by pointing out that the documentary paints a “a very different picture,”, but that “the truth lies somewhere in between.”
That did not save him from being attacked, by among others Dublin Bay North Social Democrat TD Cian O’Callaghan, for even mentioning Benefits Street which O’Callaghan claimed yesterday “vilified working class people.” As a proletarian myself, I confess not to having any feelings of class solidarity with drug dealers and shop lifters. I suspect that most horny handed – or even paper-cut handed – sons and daughters of toil, who are the ones who mostly have to live among anti-social and criminal elements supported by their tax, feel the same.
The context of all of this is the ongoing consultation on the Government’s Green Paper on Disability Reform which ends on December 13. The proposal on the part of the Department of Social Protection is that the current system in which there is one flat-rated disability payment be replaced by a three-tiered system in which payments will be awarded “depending on a person’s ability to work.”
It is that which has led to the claim by Murphy and others that the Government is proposing to introduce something akin to the British “work capability assessment” which was the downfall of Daniel Blake, apparently. The Taoiseach denied that they were setting about “knocking people off benefits,” but that they were proposing to recognise that “all disabilities are not the same and that some people need more support than others.”
The Green Paper refers to an OECD report in which it was emphasised that “the only way out of poverty is employment.” That might appear obvious, but it is contested by some who seem to prefer that a large proportion of the population are state dependents.
The statistics on the numbers of people who are in receipt of disability payment are rather striking. In response to a Dáil question from Thomas Pringle, the independent TD for Donegal, in December 2020, the then Minister for Social Protection, Heather Humphreys, said that there were 147,000 people on disability allowance and that that had increased by almost 50% from 101,000 in 2010.
What is even more extraordinary is that the Green Paper states that there are now 218,000 people in receipt of long-term disability income support. The cost of this is €2.6 billion per year, compared to €1.8 billion just three years ago. Is it possible that more than 70,000 people have become disabled since the Covid crisis? Is it the case that as Thomas Pringle claimed in 2020 that “the number of people with disabilities has unfortunately increased.”?
The overall number of people who were disabled according to the 2016 Census was 645,000. That equated to 13.6% of the population of the state. For comparative purposes the percentage of disabled people in England in 2021 was 17.7% and 21.1% in Wales. 4.1 million people in the UK as a whole were claiming a disability payment. That was 6.1% of the population, compared to 4.3% here.
That would appear to indicate that the definitions of what being disabled means, and the qualification for a disability allowance, differ between the two jurisdictions. In the United States 13.4% of the population are disabled, similar to here, but less than 3% of the population are in receipt of a disability payment.
In the UK there is also a marked difference in the numbers of people on disability benefits between the various regions. The more prosperous southern regions have significantly lower rates than those in the more economically depressed northern parts of England. A Northern Ireland Assembly report in 2010 found that 24.4% of the population of the West Belfast constituency were in receipt of a disability payment.
It would appear obvious then that there is a correlation between the overall depressed character of an area and all forms of welfare dependency, including disability allowances. Is it the case then that welfare dependency itself can become a form of disability? And that this is manifested in various forms of social disability including psychological symptoms?
No doubt that is a controversial topic, and one that is unlikely to ever consume too much debating time in the Dáil, or in any other public forum. It also highlights the fact that even at a time of almost full employment there is a small but steadily increasing strata of people who are lifelong state dependents and with no perceivable path, or perhaps even desire, to escape from it.
It is also worth recalling that no old-time social radical, whether of the democratic socialist left or the Catholic “right”, ever envisaged that human beings ought to become dependents of any person or institution. The entire point, indeed, was to give people back their dignity and autonomy.
That is not to argue that people who are not able to work for whatever reason of illness, infirmity or age ought not be cared for. Of course they should and Christianity, unlike the grossly romanticised paganism which it replaced, put that at the centre of human society. Family and charity are the fruits of that. Overweening state dependency, no matter how materially comforting, is not a healthy alternative. History has taught us that.