ONCE upon a time, ordinary people got jobs, built lives and lived – at least in economic terms – relatively happily ever after.
But now it seems that having a job is not a highway out of poverty. For 104,000 Irish people, it’s a slippery slope into it.
Poverty Focus 2018, the most recent report from Social Justice Ireland, has produced the figure, which puts working people a fraction of a percentage ahead of the unemployed in the poverty stakes,
According to the report, unemployed people make up 13.5 per cent of those living in poverty while working people constitute 13.3 per cent of that number.
Another chilling figure in this report is that of child poverty.
It concludes that more than one in four of the people living in poverty is a child.
Without doubt, the workers living on minimum wage and zero hours contracts account for a sizeable portion of the working poor but the problem is a bigger one.
The economy may be in recovery, but personal finances are not.
Most working people have expenses which have spiralled over the last few years. These include the cost of putting fuel in the car, paying bus fares and meeting ever-increasing rents because people cannot save the deposit for their own home, however hard they work.
Others who got into trouble in the bust years have managed to negotiate rescheduled mortgages with lenders to keep a roof over their heads but a huge number of these arrangements are punitive and allow no room for any kind of savings for the inevitable rainy day.
Workers, remember, also have to shoulder the burden of their own medical expenses, fuel bills, back to school demands. They enjoy none of the supports afforded to people without an income from employment.
These are people who are asking for nothing from the state other than an incentive to bring home the bacon.
A pint of plain is not your only man when a take-out cup of coffee is an extravagance.
More about society here.
