Seanán Kerr (above) is an unemployed Broadsheet reader and social welfare recipient.
He’s been called a lot of things lately.
“Sponger,” “waster” and “parasite with a buzz cut” to name just three.
And that’s just in our comments section.
Last night Seanán responded to one critic;
Where on Earth do people like you come from??!!! What TV shows did you watch growing up? The ones where Superman wiped out shanty towns? Where Batman invented the AIDS virus? Where Spiderman threw children into burning orphanages? Did the not-so-subtle subtle lesson to have a bit of compassion and thought for others, just go “whoosh” right over your head? Is your brain devoid of mirror neurons???
Nobody in their right mind chooses to be on social welfare (and I mean literally). When there was full employment in this country the rate was around 3%, of that 3% long-term was around 30% of that, so 1% of the total workforce you’re using as stick to beat the rest. A 1% of people who if you were to take a minute to think are perhaps in that situation for conditions beyond their control, like depression, dyslexia, the fact that they were more than likely born into poverty. What do you think that one percent looks like and why do you think they are as they are? Do you think they all just got up one day and said “f*** this working sh*** let’s do nothing with our lives!” Even if they did (which they almost certainly did not), giving money to these people, well it solves problems like the cost of housing people in prison and hospitals in a civil society, the sums paid out are usually recycled within the economy at a rate much faster than money paid out to public sector employees or through government contracts, so it keeps the economy, especially in less well off areas ticking over. You certainly won’t get them into work if you make their dole less, if they can’t find work in a boom how they hell do you expect it in a depression when competition for work is higher?
The whole notion of “the sponger” is a poisonous myth that serves nobody but the powerful: work a job or be the scum of the earth, that’s your life, that’s your choice, all the while they destroy the economy by destroying the ability of society to create actual jobs (either through bailout massive failed industries like the banks, selling off natural resources for profit, exporting jobs…).
But yeah blame the poor f*** who has nothing beyond their horizon but their weekly few quid and the life of middling daytime TV more a kind of rotting than living, the person who if they ever had a chance to be something they aren’t never even had the wits to seize it, yeah blame them.
If the dole is so great, then by all means, go on it, congratulate the people in receipt of it for their canniness to avoid the 9-5 grind. If it’s a “lifestyle choice” then why not choose it? People like yourselves and Joan Burton make it sound so lovely, it’s most puzzling why you don’t simply avail of it.
It’s not just the fact that it’s life of misery, penny-pinching bill paranoia, that eats away at you, because of course you obviously have no clue what it’s actually like.That sense of self-righteousness “proving yourself through work”, (as though “work” itself was the holiest of activities), that desire not to be “one of them”.
Well in order to want to “not be one of them” you have to first “not be one of them” it’s how human identity works, it’s why feral children don’t have a proper sense of self, you see “them” and you only think “thieves, scum, and parasites” funnily enough people have a habit of turning into what their treated as being, it’s almost as funny as the trait people have of using their deepest fears and paranoia about themselves as the insults they most readily throw about.
