Facebook
Twitter
YouTube
Lifestyle choice
Opinion: Unemployment is NOT a choice.
I recently discovered that being unemployed is a lifestyle choice. I was shocked when I heard this. Like me, you may scowl and wonder how can this can be. Surely we are in one of the severest economic climates in modern history?
I naively thought that it was our recession that resulted in an unparalleled rise in unemployment, along with the gargantuan guarantees, brazen bail-outs, bank busts, company collapses and credit crunch etc. How silly I was! Turns out that unemployment is really a choice! You know how I found this out….. Joan Burton, TD told me. In fact, she told everyone and added that she was coming for their welfare; not only that, but that the government had already begun to cut back on it.
Sarcasm aside, this claim is patently absurd, as anyone looking for a job, or even anyone who knows anyone looking for work will testify. During the boom times, when the country got job creation right, unemployment fell to and remained around 4%. That was for the best part of the last decade. Today that figure is 14.2%.
Now people haven’t simply gotten much lazier Joan; there isn’t a virus of work-shyness scouring the population. People are in fact willing to work when there are jobs to be had, which brings us to the real problem - the lack of opportunities for unemployed and underemployed people, young and old. The thousands of young people making the ‘”lifestyle choice” to emigrate are not doing it for the sh!ts and giggles either. Similarly to their compatriots who languish on the dole, they are doing so out of desperation, out of a dark hopelessness about the state of this nation, and the future (or lack thereof), that it offers them.
Of course, there are those who insist on treating social welfare as an endless hand-out; I don’t for one second doubt that. Naturally there are those who could make more of a meaningful effort to search for employment.
What I do absolutely object to though, is Joan Burton’s attempt to portray the genuine suffering of young people (by far the worst affected by this economic calamity) as some-kind of scrounging. Why, when there is scant hope of school leavers and graduates getting any kind of employment, does the Minister for Social Welfare feel it is appropriate to use her bully pulpit to attack young people?
While we are on the subject of “lifestyle choices”, let us take a look at the politicians supposedly representing Ireland and her young people. Joan Burton for instance, was first elected in 1992, almost twenty years ago, though she lost her seat for five years during that period. That still leaves almost 15 years of tax payer funded employment. Enda Kenny, the Taoiseach, who recently confirmed his support for his Minister’s stance was first elected to the Dail in 1975. Yes that is ‘75, in other words about a decade before any of the country’s current young people were even born. He has been cocooned in the Dail for 36 years, in what was his father’s seat.
So perhaps it can be no real surprise that these people, so far removed from the day to day hardship of unemployed youth can make such outrageous statements. The nation needs jobs, not populist baseless statements designed to create a scapegoat to distract attention away from this government’s lack luster attempts to remedy the continuingly brutal employment situation in Ireland.
If it is a choice Joan, why didn’t you let me and my classmates know before we graduated? Maybe I’d be sitting in my dream job now. If I had only known it was as simple as that…….
By: John Dunphy
