TD suggests lump sum for jobless foreigners
FOREIGN UNEMPLOYED workers in Ireland could be given a lump sum payment of up to six months' worth of unemployment benefit if they agree to return home, Fine Gael TD Leo Varadkar has suggested.
"Is there an opportunity to give them three to six months of benefit?" he suggested at the Oireachtas Committee on Enterprise, Trade and Employment.
The number of foreign unemployed workers in Ireland now stands at 16 per cent of the total on the Live Register - exactly proportional to the numbers in the workforce.
The proposal is based on a Spanish model announced recently where unemployed foreign nationals from 20 countries have been offered €18,000 to go home on condition they do not come back for three years.
The Dublin West TD insisted that a lump-sum benefit payment should not be used "to force them" to return to their home countries, "but as an option".
Describing Mr Varadkar's intervention as "very, very dangerous", Fianna Fáil Meath TD Thomas Byrne said "voluntary repatriation is a new low by Fine Gael".
Later Mr Byrne said: "This comes in the dishonourable tradition of the British National Party. They are the only other party supporting voluntary repatriation."
Fás director general Rody Molloy said EU nationals in Ireland were entitled to "exactly the same rights" as locals.
Irish people working in other EU countries could not be discriminated against either.
He would be "very nervous" about doing anything that "should in any way suggest" that foreign nationals were not welcome in Ireland, even if that was not the intention of the proposal.
He said there was a danger that even a voluntary programme could be misinterpreted and "then you would run into issues about how voluntary it is".
Brid O'Brien, the head of policy and media of the Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed, said she would be "very concerned" if "different categories" of unemployed were created.
It emerged last month that the Department of Social and Family Affairs had scrapped paying dole payments directly into claimants' bank accounts in an attempt to curb fraud by foreign and Irish workers who have quit Ireland after losing jobs here.
Since then claimants have had to sign on at post offices weekly - rather than have the payments made automatically into their bank accounts - rather than signing on once a month as happened before.
© 2008 The Irish Times
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2008/0905/1220544893448.html
-
Someone has just tried to post the link to this website on here, we have deleted it. WARNING 2008 list online WTF is going on at the BNP ? ...
8 comments:
Ireland have the guts to say it, but when will Britain?
We are about to face the worst economic climate for 60yrs.
Send THEM ALL back, and sod the 3yrs, stay way forever.
Labour has a small voluntary repatriation grant originally introduced by Heath. Then there are the payments to failed asylum seekers. So it's not just the BNP as claimed.
Of course the current arrangements are half-hearted and designed only to get headlines.
Any one with out a job must return to their home land, n black or white but preferably black/brown but will a LABOUR OR A TORY government be brave enough to say it ,mean it and do it , well! know they will not because they want VOTES to stay in office but not power.
man with a bag on his head.
The Irish were idiots to let them in in the first place. After years of fighting for their independence, what do they do when they get it? That's right, the same as everyone else: let in boat loads of Turd-Worlders! Pity they didn't have the fore-sight to see that with their tiny population they would be over-run faster than the other sheeples!
It reminds me of a book i was reading years ago called, Pyrrhic victory ,it tells the tail of a IRA OPERATIVE LIVING IN THE USA on the run from the British security forces and wanted by the British government on terrorist charges. well the war ends and he returns home to be greeted not by a fellow Irishman at the customs but by a Indian and later on return to his home village and in his local pub he witness's the local girls going out with blacks and brown men in preference to his own country men in anger
when he gets back to his hotel room he thinks what the hell have i been fighting for ,i fought the Brits because i thought they was the invaders ! so what have I/WE achieved we kick one invader out of the same RACE as us and a new invader arrives of a different race than me and the Brits but and we Irish have nothing in common with Indian or African or Chinese people ,the end result is he blows his brains out in disgust and dispair whilst remembering all his comrades killed in a fruitless war only to be betrayed by this newly installed IRA/BRITISH government.
A Pyrrhic victory is no victory at all.
keyser soiza
I would like to read that book, can you please tell me the author?
I think it was KEITH THOMSON BUT NOT UNDER HIS NAME,he was a one time member of the LSG but i have no t/p no for him or an adress.
keyser soiza
The TD is the teapot isn't he ?
Post a Comment