Sent to the deputy this morning, concerning these comments in the Irish Times today:

His Labour counterpart Róisín Shortall said she generally welcomed the scheme as it gave an opportunity to extend social and community schemes – already well-established in rural areas – to cities and towns. “I have some concerns about the use of this scheme to tackle fraud. This should be about helping those who are unemployed but who wish to work,” she said.

Deputy Shortall,

As a constituent, I’m writing to raise the issue of your support for the government’s introduction of compulsory, unpaid menial labour for the unemployed. I would rather have done so in person at your Monday clinic, but I note that, while you’re free to pontificate in The Irish Times about how the unemployed should be compelled to spend their days, you are not available to constituents at your clinic for the entire month of August. Forgive my cynicism, but I suspect that you are not performing obligatory unpaid labour to retain your salary.

This measure, with its obvious parallels to the community service work enforced upon those convicted by the courts, is another step in the establishment’s criminalisation of the poor. The Labour Party’s acceptance of neoliberalism and silent complicity with the government’s persecution of workers and the unemployed (simultaneous with the bailing out of the rich) is no secret. That you, however, a deputy representing an area with one of the highest levels of unemployment in the country, could so brazenly support such a vicious assault on the jobless and poor beggars belief.

The entire ideological thrust of this scheme is morally repugnant. It is not a matter of approving of it in principle but having reservations about certain specifics, at least not to anyone who gives a damn about the unemployed. If the “work” involved is useful and necessary, it should be offered on a full- or part-time basis with all relevant employment and union rights and benefits respected. If it is not useful, it is pointless, punitive, degrading and designed to pinch a few pennies from those who can be cut loose from the welfare system by being humiliated in this way. We both know that only the latter is applicable to this scheme.

In the Dáil last year, you strongly criticised the minister for the unpardonable withdrawal of the Christmas Bonus from welfare recipients. I have repeatedly asked representatives of the Labour Party since then to commit, as a matter of policy and of basic morality, to restoring the bonus in government. They have repeatedly and pointedly refused. I invite you to make this commitment, or to confirm, in its absence and taking your views on the matter above into consideration, that your sympathies lie with the government, the rich and the establishment, and not with the poor, the unemployed and the destitute.

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