Ask any ordinary working family how much they earn and they’ll tell you not enough! They will tell you how much they are struggling to keep the wolf (bank) from their door. They will tell you how they now shop in German discount stores as opposed to one of the national symbol groups and they will tell you how much they fear anyone in the family unit getting sick, as they don’t have a medical card
They will go on to talk about the fear they have of events like birthdays, mothers day, fathers day, Easter and Christmas and the cost of daily, weekly and monthly life. They will tell you that they can barely afford to put petrol in the car, a car they need to get to work as they live outside of the city, or the cost of getting the kids back to school.
Ordinary decent working families in Ireland today live in fear, they are fighting for survival with their very last breaths and the air is running out. These people have worked all their lives, they have paid multiple taxes, they have done everything that has been asked of them by the government and for this they are doomed to play the game of life in peasantry. A life for some that is not worth living…
But there are others who play a very different game they play the claim game. It’s a game the whole family can play by making a claim to the Department of Social Protection for just about anything and everything. The winners of this game know how to play the system for all it’s worth! They know every tactic, every play, every “right” they have and they get paid.
There appears to be an international federation of “players” who actively partake in the claim game with a number of foreign national players sending their “winnings” back home, wherever “home” happens to be. This transfer of winnings is preformed week in, week out in the very building where they collect their winnings. There are too many stories told by friends and family about witnessing this very act of money transfer in the local post office for it to be a petty rumour.
Today in the Irish examiner we are told of a family who are “winning”over €90k a year and how a Senator thinks this is wrong, “€50,000 is more than enough for a family to survive on”
Well in the first place, he’s right. €90k a year (cash in hand!) for doing nothing is excessive and to say that “€50,000 is more than enough for a family to survive on” is also right but I can tell you that he is very wrong if he thinks that most families come even close to that level of income. A family bringing in €50K has to earn well over €100K before tax to even see €50K coming into the household. What job pays that these days. The only families I know of earning that type of money work for banks or semi-state companies or better yet – the Government and they are at the top of those organisations
In effect, this “winning” family are taking in over €190K “before tax…
Time to learn how to play a new game me thinks…
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