Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party)

In recent days press reports on briefings given by the Minister for Social Protection and senior officials in her Department have pointed to the beginning of a campaign to exert pressure on and harass unemployed people. Apparently, the Minister is to unveil next week a programme entitled, Pathways to Work. It has been stated every unemployed person in the State will be given a date by which he or she will be expected to be off the live register. This is referred to in a sinister turn of phrase as the "prediction of exit date", something one might associate more with sentencing in a capital trial rather than with how people who find themselves in difficult circumstances should be treated. If the unemployed person is not off the live register by that date, he or she will face what has been referred to as a "challenging interview". Apparently, senior officials in the Department are referring to this among themselves as "Operation Transformation", a reference to an RTE project as part of which people who consider themselves to be overweight or seriously obese undertake a stringent programme to overcome the problem.

We have been told in the same briefings that the Minister's drive will include calling unemployed people to Alcoholics Anonymous-style motivation meetings if they do not meet their exit dates.

The criminal profiteering and greed of a tiny minority of people in this State led to a catastrophic collapse in economic activity over the past three and a half years. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people lost their jobs. The disastrous austerity policies of this Government and its predecessor have kept hundreds of thousands of people on the dole, unfortunately. Are they to be regarded as having a serious dependency disease, of which they have to be cured? Will the cure involve humiliating and harassing them and making it intolerable for them to come to get their weekly support? Is this how far the Labour Party has fallen in less than a year? Before last year's general election, it published extensive documents claiming it would be the champion of the jobless and the powerhouse of job creation.

In the same week that the perpetrators of this crisis - the speculating bondholders - have been rewarded to the tune of €1.25 billion, it has been revealed that a Labour Party Minister is planning the institutionalised victimisation of the very victims of this crisis. Those precious resources should be used to create emergency programmes of work for unemployed people. We have been told this is being pushed by the troika, which makes sense. The idea of an army of unemployed people in the peripheral countries of Europe competing with each other to be forced into dreadfully paying jobs, thereby driving down wages and conditions, is part of the troika's programme. That is the pitiless strategy of capitalism. Can the Tánaiste explain why the Labour Party, which was founded by the great champions of the victims - Connolly, Larkin and others - intends to participate in the classic Tory ploy of victimising and blaming the unemployed, who are the victims of this crisis?

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