Danny Boy

Irish denied social welfare because of red-tape bureaucracy

Over 3,000 returning Irish emigrants are being refused social welfare payments (known as 'the dole' in Ireland) because of erratically enforced 'habitual residency' requirements stipulating that you have to be resident in the Republic for two years before you can make a claim for payments.

According to media reports, this is causing great hardship.

Joe O'Brien, the policy officer with Crosscare, an Irish NGO working with Irish migrants, says that the welfare officers themselves often apply the laws incorrectly, and may be causing even more hardship than is necessary.

Has exporting employment been Ireland’s downfall?

It's hard or impossible to make the following point without sounding like a xenophobe, angry young man, or just a plain ol' racist, but Irish companies' off-shoring of jobs to countries with cheaper wage bases like India was and isn't good for the country's economic future.

I've been thinking about this point over the last few days as I've been speaking to various Irish cellphone providers for support switching networks, and most of the voices speaking back to me have been calling from places like Pakistan and India.

I'm all for integration, multi-culturalism and a mixed multitude of people in Ireland, and these things can only be for the good of the country, but I think we have to ask ourselves the question whether it was necessary or good to move as many jobs overseas as we eventually did?

Irish students turn to prostitution to pay for class

Even in recession-worn Ireland with its booming dog-washing courses and rampant unemployment I never thought I'd read that students were turning to prostitution.

Yet according to an article in the Irish Independent, CorkStudentNews.com and the Union of Students in Ireland, Irish students are turning to escorting and sugar babying to help pay their way through college and ultimately life.

"We've been hearing more and more about students having to go to these lengths [prostituting] to pay for their education and I think it's a shocking indictment of the state of the country," the Union of Students in Ireland's President, Gary Redmond, told the newspaper, confirming rumours that this was starting to be a problem in Dublin.

Students hope to stop emigration with 'internships', but enterprise and jobs are what's needed.

The Union of Students in Ireland's daring bid to stop Irish student emigration by creating internships doesn't seem to be making much headway.

The glossy new policy document launched this September to help halt student emigration through a €52m internship creation programme seems to have vanished off the news pages,.

Perhaps the answer is because it will probably do little to solve or help the emigration problem.

Sandwiches and potted plants: what the Irish are paying tax for.

A great story from Sunday's Irish newspapers which managed to marry politics with a completely unintentional and typically Irish brand of humour was a story by Nick Webb and Roisin Burke of the Independent on Sunday.

The two journalists managed, through a Freedom of Information request, to find out the 2009-2010 spend figures from the Department of Communications Energy and Natural Resources. The results were almost as comical as they were shocking.

Potted plants, life coaching, and landscaping services were just some of the uses which the bureaucrats had seen fit to dispose of taxpayers' dollars on, and in fairly hefty proportions.

Patience running thin for Church in Ireland

The Irish Examiner reports yesterday that a campaigning nun from Fermoy (Co.Cork) is challenging the Church's no-go stance on ordaining female priests.

"People are looking for change now," wrote Sr Louvenagh Heffernan in the Cork-based daily, "and that means the priesthood has to change."

But Sister Heffernan is just the latest figure within 'the fold' to criticize the way the modern Roman Catholic Church is run, and to take issue with the notion that the issue of female ordination isn't up for discussion.