Fine Gael TD and Minister for Social Protection Leo Varadkar

This morning.

On Today with Seán O’Rourke.

Further to the Minister for Social Protection Leo Varadkar’s Welfare Cheats Cheat Us All campaign…

Cllr Gavin Mendel-Gleason, of the Workers’ Party, in Dublin North West, and Paddy Smyth, Dublin City Fine Gael councillor for Rathgar-Rathmines, spoke to Mr O’Rourke about Mr Varadkar’s campaign.

Former inspector with the Department of Social Protection Bernadette Gorman later joined the conversation by phone.

Ms Gorman accused Mr Varadkar of launching the welfare cheat campaign as a means to improve his chances of becoming the next leader of Fine Gael and, by extension, Taoiseach.

She also called it a “hate campaign”.

From the interview:

Sean O’Rourke: “First of all, to you, Paddy Smyth, Fine Gael councillor for Rathgar-Rathmines. Is Leo Varadkar taking, is he taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut here?”

Paddy Smyth: “Not necessarily. The amount of welfare fraud that goes on, estimated by the department, is a sizeable sum. Hundreds of millions of euros, of taxpayers’ money, that is claimed fraudulently. Now, the most interesting thing, I think, about this campaign is the reaction from certain parties. The fact that certain parties can find a politically profitable to condone, if not rightly encourage, social welfare fraud, I think is a very worrying development for our society. As I said, hundreds of millions of euros.”

O’Rourke: “Hold on now, where is this hundreds of millions coming from now?”

Smyth: “Well, the department estimates, based on the amount of fraud that they detect, they can then extrapolate out, if they hadn’t detected that fraud, that, essentially, their estimates would put the figure between €200m and €500m. That is fraud and obviously some of that would be error and…”

O’Rourke: “They’re saying this is what we’re not detecting?”

Smyth: “This, they, let’s say 41million was detected in fraud, let’s say 2015, then, but if you say, right, well, if that went on, if that was left undetected for several years, then you could extrapolate out…”

O’Rourke: “Oh, this is a bit like Garret FitzGerald back in the day, saying if we hadn’t taken the mini budget measures, in the middle of the year, the current budget deficit in the second half of the year would have been far worse. Is that the kind of mathematics you’re talking about now?”

Smyth: “Well, this is department estimates. They can’t project is likely to be going on based on how much they detect. And if they can extrapolate that much…”

O’Rourke: “So, it’s not, it’s fraud that might happen as opposed to fraud that did happen? Is that what we’re talking about now?”

Smyth: “This is fraud that they, that they estimate that they have prevented. These are estimates, these aren’t an exact science and that’s why there are confidence intervals…”

O’Rourke: “Gavin Mendel-Gleason, very important to prevent fraud, surely?”

Mendel-Gleason: “Yeah, of course, it’s important, but this is definitely, a sledgehammer to crack a nut-type situation. And those numbers are, quite frankly, just ridiculous. I mean the reality is most of this, two-thirds, like, back in 2011, when they had some surveys of how much was being paid out, two-thirds of the amounts, that they’re reporting as fraud, were actually overpayments. And these overpayments are often times administrative error and often times they’re an administrative error by the Department of Social Protection, not the people who are involved in it.”

“So, in 2011, it was about €26million, it was actual, verifiable fraud. The rest of it wasn’t fraud at all. And that €26million of fraud, I mean, often times, you’re talking about people who are really on the very edge. You know, it’s people who are just barely making it by, like your man getting a few extra quid a week. If you’re making €10,000 a year on the dole, you’re finding it very difficult to live in Dublin, very, very difficult. And, you know, when people try to do things over the edge…”

Later

O’Rourke: “Let’s bring in someone who’s got a lot of experience dealing with people on social protection payments. Bernadette Gorman, good morning to you.”

Bernadette Gorman: “Good morning, Sean.”

O’Rourke: “You are a former inspector with the Department of Social Protection, what did that work entail?”

Gorman: “Well, that work entailed, you know, back in the day, I supposed I joined in 1981 and I was around the country for the first three years, filling in for people and assisting people and then I settled in Dublin. There was a lot of means-testing then, of OAP actually. Because most people didn’t have, a lot of people didn’t have the full contributions, PRSI contributions. But, yes, I mean fraud would come up from time to time. But I have to say it was always very, very miniscule and we were always…well, first and foremost, I want to speak about how I was trained in the department because I do not like the way the department is going. And I do think Leo Varadkar was clearly on a solo run but I don’t know what his senior officials were doing allowing it.”

“…. The fraud I came across was so minuscule, it never required, you know, a sledgehammer to crack a nut. It was always very small. I’ll give one example of a lady whose husband had been gambling their social welfare payments and she eventually got a deserted wive’s allowance and she had gone into hoc because of what her husband was doing, she got into hoc with an unscrupulous moneylender. You see don’t forget, social welfare people don’t have any credit rating and this is before, you know, credit unions, or MABS [Money and Budgeting Service] or any of that. So, the poor woman was working in a hotel, a few hours a day, standing, ironing sheets. And getting a small amount of money, to pay off the moneylender. The woman was distraught. I got it from a tip-off so I had to deal with it.

“How could you possibly, you know, come the hound on somebody like that? I did say, it was fraudulent, it was wrong, and I had set up a small overpayment, on her deserted wive’s, until it was paid back. But, I mean these are all terribly complex human stories and the fraud I came across was always like that. but don’t forget that almost 70% of these payments are going to OAPs and disabled people. Now, many Leo Varadkar thinks that these people don’t have a vote but I can tell you, that OAPs do have a vote and this is a hate campaign and the statistics out there are incorrect.”

O’Rourke: “A hate campaign?”

Gorman: “It is a hate campaign. Because never in my life, and I’m 30 years associated with that department, never was there a campaign like it. Coming after savage austerity and after,r you know, what was now very visible wronging anyway, in other sectors of society, going unchecked. And here we have this sledgehammer to crack a nut.”

“Leo Varadkar spent just shy of a quarter of a million on that. And it’s all about his own bid to become a leader. And you had one of your people there saying that it was, to quote him, politically profitable. Well, you know, this is why he [Varadkar] did. He’s the one who’s making political profit…”

O’Rourke: “Ok, let’s hear Paddy Smyth on that.”

Smyth: “I think, it is ironic that Dr Varadkar is being accused of this being politically motivated….he’s doing his job. This is a budget that he is responsible for. It is his job to make sure that that is protected. It is his job to make sure that the allegations that he makes…”

Gorman: “That’s what I mean, you can’t social welfare fraud in isolation of other sectors in society..”

Smyth: “Nobody is suggesting he did.”

Talk over each other

Gorman: “…Government policy. Overall Government policy in this country has not observed what we would call the social contract. And back in the day, I can tell you when there was a chief inspector’s office in that department, the imprudence of that extraordinary campaign because he’s accusing people, that majority of people who are highly compliant of wrongdoing. One lady, I did take him on on social media, and one woman sent me a private message which, upon the back of which, I wrote to Leo Varadkar. She had worked all her life, had brought up her child on her own, who’s now aged 23, who’s now suffering from terminal cancer, in her 50s, and said it made her feel like scum. And she was glad that somebody in the system called him out.

“Would he accuse other people so lightly and put up wrong statistics all over buses, all over the city? Which is against the advertising standards. There is not half million fraud. In fact, three-quarters of it, as somebody pointed out, is through administrative error and I’m not, in one minute, I’m not condoning it. But don’t forget that, you know, all social welfare is spent on the economy. A quarter of our people are living at one point, four million of our society’s citizens, and I call them citizens, and there was supposed to be a customer charter…”

O’Rourke: “Ok, just…”

Gorman: “I would call it a citizens’ charter in that department…”

O’Rourke: “Just…”

Gorman: “Which assumes, which assumes honesty. Where is the assumption of honesty for the majority of people who are compliant?”

O’Rourke: “Let’s just hear Cllr Paddy Smyth just in respect of that point.”

Gorman: “Yeah.”

Smyth: “Just first of all, you’ve accused the minister of accusing the majority of recipients of committing fraud, he’s never done such a thing so…”

Gorman: “Yeah, well, that’s how it comes across on the buses. That’s the way it comes across on the billboards. That’s how it comes across.”

Smyth: “That’s your interpretation.”

Gorman: “He put up a quarter of a million, sorry, a quarter of a billion. There’s not a quarter of a billion fraud. That is not correct….”

Talk over each other

Smyth: “We can get bogged down…”

Gorman: “He spent shy of a quarter of a million on that…”

Smyth: “Ok, we can get bogged down on the figures here, let’s just…”

Talk over each other

O’Rourke: “Bernadette, Bernadette, Bernadette, hang on, you’re just going to have to let the others contribute please. And I will come back to you, ok?”

Smyth: “Let’s just suspend disbelief for a moment and accept the figure of €25million or so, it’s still €25million that the workers of Ireland have to work damn hard to earn so that they can pay taxes so that the Government can then give that money to the most needy in society. But, you talked about a social contract. There needs to be good will on both sides. And the taxpayers of Ireland need to know that the people who are receiving social welfare, that their needs are bona fides.”

Later

Mendel-Gleason: “This is not about prudent financial arrangements at all. If you look at it, you know, we were talking about, you know, maybe €25million, maybe it’s €50million, that’s between 0.1 and 0.2% of the entire social welfare budget. A tiny amount. It’s not a real problem. Now if we look at the amount in jobseekers’ allowance payment, we went from €1.5billion in 2007 to over €3.5billion, after the crash. And that is just, it vastly swamps it. If you really wanted to tackle costs and financial problems, in the budget, and where taxpayers’ money is going, you’d be looking at putting people back to work and that is not what you’re doing…”

Smyth: “Which is exactly what we’re doing…That is why we have a Minister for Enterprise, why we have a Minister for Jobs…why are we attacking the minister…”

Mendel-Gleason: “Now, this is interesting, I’ll tell you why…so I just recently… I was recently talking to Enterprise Ireland. Now if you want to talk about the taxpayers’ money being utilised in a prudent way. I was talking to somebody from Enterprise Ireland, they said they want to create jobs and they don’t want equity in the company. Now, if you can imagine, you were a capitalist and you went and you decided to make an arrangement, where you were giving money to some company and getting nothing in return, does that seem prudent?

Smyth: “Ok.”

Mendel-Gleason: “Does that seem like a sensible solution? This is a social welfare programme for corporations and not about just using taxpayers’ money efficiently…”

Gorman: “Exactly.”

Mendel-Gleeson: “…and in a sensible way.”

Smyth: “Ok. I think. What we’re doing here is we’re criticising a minister for defending his budget. I mean if we’re to listen to the contributors here, we would expect the minister, and to read Gavin’s article, we would expect Minister Varadkar to hide under a blanket…”

Gorman: “But can I ask..”

O’Rourke: “Hold on a minute, Bernadette…”

Smyth: “To hide under a blanket, basically, until the leadership of Fine Gael has, has been contested, lest he offends the sensibilities of the left.”

Talk over each other

Smyth: “This whataboutery is the most bizarre thing about this argument. Would we give out about the Department of Social Welfare changing their toilet paper vendor to save money because, oh, Apple owes us money.”

Mendel-Gleason: “This is a very good point. I agree. So, I’m in computer science, I’m a doctor of computer science and we have something called premature optimisation and that’s where you focus in on 0.1 or 0.2% of a problem and you try to solve that 0.1 or 0.2% when you can deal with the 50%. What you’re supposed to do is go after the 50%. And it is actually a poor use of resources…”

Gorman: “You cannot take welfare fraud in isolation…”

Talk over each other and later

O’Rourke: “Bernadette, I want to come back to you and I want to come back to something, you said an interesting thing in your first contribution, where you talked about the minister going on a solo run and I’m quoting you here, because I took a note of it, ‘I don’t know what his senior officials were doing allowing it’.”

Gorman: “Yes I don’t. Quite candidly because…”

O’Rourke: “Are they, are they supposed to tell him what to do?”

Gorman: “Well, I mean, the job of the civil service has always been, especially the senior ones, to give impartial and prudent advice to the ministers. And may I quote the most authoritative…”

O’Rourke: “But I mean when you say they, what were they doing allowing it, that implies that they were in a position to disallow him, in other words, say, ‘minister, you are not doing this’. Is that the way they’re supposed to operate?”

Gorman: “Well I think they should have flagged that it was highly imprudent. Because at the end of the day, you know, you cannot look at it in isolation. There is a perception of massive corporate fraud out there and banking collapses and all the rest of it and wrongdoing and here you have this going on.”

Smyth: “We’re back to the whataboutery.”

Gorman: Can you imagine what it’s like for an inspector on the beat going out…”

Later

Gomran: “Nowadays, it’s very difficult for anybody doing that job, to put up with the level of abuse you can get about how the Government is operating. And I do believe he’s on a solo run and I do believe it’s all about his own ego. It’s a very, very distasteful campaign and never, never in the history of the State, while I was in there, has there been a campaign like it. And never when there was so much compliance, compliance at a time of austerity measures which were, you know, quite savage, on social welfare people…”

O’Rourke: “And what do you think, Bernadette, of the idea of naming people who have been convicted of welfare fraud?”

Gorman: “I think it’s absolutely scandalous. I really do. And, again, it’s how we’re drifting in this country. I mean drifting towards naming and shaming people, many of whom were kind of driven into fraud for a lot of complex reasons that I spoke about….It’s the way we are drifting. It’s a war on the poor. It’s class warfare actually. It’s a very Tory-ite idea and it’s a very American thing and, again, I think we should be looking at other models, like the Scandinavian model. Don’t forget, you know, we are a developed economy. And all developed economies have a highly robust welfare system there for people who need it, or whatever, who fall into that category for whatever reason. But it’s implicit in the campaign that everybody on welfare is some sort of cheat, is some sort of scum really.”

Smyth: “That is your interpretation.”

Gorman: “Well, it’s not my interpretation because I have…listen I have, I can speak on this with authority, over and above the rest of you, if I may say so, because I was on the beat. And, you know, it is, and I want to quote TK Whitaker. When he said, about, when he wrote his book about how the civil service became politicised. And one of the things he said was that they seemed to exist now to massage the egos of their political masters instead of giving prudent advice and it would not be prudent at this time to have such a sledgehammer to crack a nut, an expensive campaign. And, in my view, it is all about his aspirations to be the leader. And it is quite disgusting. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. And all my old colleagues, whom I’ve spoken to, the old guard, as I would call them, they thought…”

O’Rourke: “A lot of people listening are actually agreeing with Bernadette Gorman there…”

Later

Mendel-Gleason: “We have €2.5billion in fraud from white-collar workers and…”

Smyth: “Let’s crack down on that.”

Mendel-Gleason: “Well, how many people have been allocated to cracking down on this, do you know? Cause the gardaí were being trained, they were training 40 people to deal with this. Do you know how many people are on this control of welfare?”

Smyth: “I’ve a feeling you’re going to tell me.”

Mendel-Gleason: “Over 300. So, like, what’s going on? We have €7.2billion that the State was defrauded by, by McAteer, Casey and Bowe, Anglo Irish Bank executives and Irish Life…”

Smyth: “We’re back to whataboutery...the minister has no remit over this..”

Listen back here

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