IRELAND\u2019S MINIMUM INCOME benefits aren\u2019t even close to enough to keep people out of poverty, according to new research.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Those earning less than \u20ac377 per week are considered to be below the poverty line, but the minimum income benefits for a single person, including jobseeker\u2019s and disability allowance, are just \u20ac254, rising to \u20ac264 next year.<\/p>\n
Spanish investigative outlet Civio<\/a>\u00a0conducted the analysis in collaboration with the European Data Journalism Network<\/a>, which includes The Journal.<\/p>\n Susanne Rogers, a research and policy analyst at Social Justice Ireland, says there is still an attitude in Irish society that those who don\u2019t work are lazy, and that poverty is \u201can individual failing\u201d. But she says many people are trapped in poverty since childhood.<\/p>\n Jobseekers are disproportionately \u201cdemonised\u201d, considering they only account for about 15% of the state\u2019s welfare recipients, she said.<\/p>\n Ireland ranks seventh in the EU for the buying power of its welfare payments, according to Civio\u2019s research.\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s behind Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Spain and Austria.<\/p>\n The poverty threshold is 60% of the median income of each country.<\/p>\n The analysis found that Ireland\u2019s welfare payment for an unemployed single person receiving supplementary welfare allowance is 37.8% below the poverty line.<\/p>\n For couples who don\u2019t have children it\u2019s 30.8% below the line, and for couples with two children it\u2019s 36.9% below.<\/p>\n \u2018Extreme poverty\u2019 is defined as earning 40% or less of the median income in the country you live in.<\/p>\n This means children in households that rely solely on state support are close to living in extreme poverty.<\/p>\n The analysis found that Denmark and Luxembourg are the only EU countries where minimum income benefits are above the poverty line, and that\u2019s only for couples or families with children. Single people are still below the poverty line in both countries.\u00a0<\/p>\n Ireland fares better than several Western European countries, including France and Germany, where payments are 51% and 61% below the poverty line, respectively, for a single person.<\/p>\n The countries where payments had the lowest purchasing power were Estonia, Czechia, Latvia and Croatia. They were more than 70% below the poverty line.\n<\/p>\n \u2018Not a vote winner\u2019<\/p>\n According to Rogers, governments rarely talk about radically increasing welfare payments as it is \u201cnot a big vote winner\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cEvery time we go and talk about social welfare or adequate rates, the first thing that crops up is [whether it is] a disincentive to work,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n \u201cThe big fear seems to be that if we give people enough money to survive on through the social welfare system, most of us are going to go [stop working].<\/p>\n \u201cOnly people who have never been on social welfare seem to think that that\u2019s what\u2019s happening.\u201d<\/p>\n Rogers said there\u2019s an impression that if the country is at near full employment then those without jobs have made that choice. However, she says some people who have very little education or support, or who struggle with addiction, may not have a choice.<\/p>\n She said people tell themselves that those on welfare \u201care unlike us\u201d and if they were \u201csmarter\u201d or \u201cmade different decisions\u201d then they wouldn\u2019t be poor.<\/p>\n That fits into the stories that we can tell ourselves: That poverty is an individual failing.<\/p>\n She said people don\u2019t understand that \u201cif you\u2019re born into poverty, the odds are you will spend your entire life with poverty\u201d.<\/p>\n Rogers hopes that even if government ministers haven\u2019t lived below the poverty line themselves, they\u2019ll learn about that experience by working with constituents. But she is unsure whether that\u2019s enough to change policy.<\/p>\n \u201cI just don\u2019t know whether it\u2019s a vote winner, to be putting money into the social welfare system when the rhetoric is always about the \u2018squeezed middle\u2019, about people \u2018who get up early in the morning\u2019,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n However, keeping people on low incomes can lead to more state spending in other areas, she says.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think [politicians] fully understand that if you don\u2019t support low-income households, those costs don\u2019t disappear. They just crop up elsewhere.<\/p>\n \u201cThey crop up in the health system, or in the education system, or in the justice system.\u201d<\/p>\n European civil society organisations have been calling for years for minimum income programmes that can be extrapolated to all member states.<\/p>\n In 2023, the EU made a series of recommendations for countries on how to improve its welfare systems and decrease poverty, but it was not mandatory to implement them.<\/p>\n iframe{position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%}@container civio-graph(min-width:375px){#imv-pobreza-eu{padding-top:1068px}}@container civio-graph(min-width:425px){#imv-pobreza-eu{padding-top:1050px}}@container civio-graph(min-width:550px){#imv-pobreza-eu{padding-top:974px}}@container civio-graph(min-width:570px){#imv-pobreza-eu{padding-top:939px}}@container civio-graph(min-width:600px){#imv-pobreza-eu{padding-top:923px}}@container civio-graph(min-width:660px){#imv-pobreza-eu{padding-top:879px}}@container civio-graph(min-width:768px){#imv-pobreza-eu{padding-top:834px}}]]><\/p>\n Analysis and additional reporting by Mar\u00eda \u00c1lvarez del Vayo and Maria Toldr\u00e0 (Civio<\/a>, Spain). This article was published in collaboration with the European Data Journalism Network<\/a> in the context of ChatEurope<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"IRELAND\u2019S MINIMUM INCOME benefits aren\u2019t even close to enough to keep people out of poverty, according to new…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":665756,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[943,113,14729,61,60,43,2733,4814,11258],"class_list":["post-665755","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-cost-of-living","tag-economy","tag-government-policy","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news","tag-october","tag-poverty","tag-social-welfare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/665755","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=665755"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/665755\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/665756"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=665755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=665755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=665755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}