Black heart of the Irish state laid bare
‘TWAS a strange week but one in which the diseased black heart of the Irish State was laid bare.
If nothing else, the shocking revelations of the past few days have proved beyond doubt that this Republic is more concerned about cash than caring for the elderly and disabled.
We now know that governments and senior civil servants conspired to deny at least 12,000 vulnerable people their disability allowance payments.
It has also emerged that there was a secret plan to block compensation for older people who were ripped off by the State for nursing home charges.
Think about that. The families of people in their 70s, 80s and 90s being forced to go to the courts before the State would give them what was rightfully theirs.
What this amounted to is the callous persecuting of old age pensioners who worked hard all their lives and paid their taxes in order to protect the State’s coffers.
The hypocrisy of a State that set itself up as an exemplar of human rights while devising schemes to prey on the vulnerabilities of the disabled and their families is both breathtaking and disgusting.
What we learned this week is that this is no country for old men or women, especially if they don’t have the wherewithal and financial resources to take on the power and legal muscle of the State.
Then it emerged that another scheme was concocted to secretly force ordinary households to pay for the electricity of giant corporations. You couldn’t make it up but those who run this twisted State and the minions who serve them did.
For well over a decade domestic customers struggling to pay their bills during the austerity years were subsidising the electricity supply to the data centres of multinationals which were making billions in profits each year.
It wouldn’t happen in a banana republic but it did in this one as and now the public who were ripped off are to get a paltry €50 in compensation when the real figure should be closer to €500.
This scandal has also shown that the toothless Commission for Regulation of Utilities is useless and has little interest in protecting the public. The above amounts to financial abuse of the elderly and obtaining money by deception.
If an individual were to do that they would likely go to prison but those who actually dreamed up these schemes ended up with huge pensions.
But there were also some lighter moments this week, one being the finding that Ireland is the 10th “cleanest” country in a global index measuring perceptions of public-sector corruption.
Transparency International obviously didn’t contact the families of the 12,000 vulnerable people swindled out of their disability benefits by a callous State.
Next time they compile such an index they should also give the ESB a ring and ask how these same families were conned
into paying the electricity bills of multinational corporations. They might also question why governments could deprive its citizens of their financial and legal rights yet were able to hand over the wealth of the nation, including its pension fund, to banks and their unsecured bondholders.
But the State will go to almost any lengths to protect its coffers.
The women caught up in the Hepatitis C and the Cervicalcheck scandals know only too well that the system would have destroyed them to protect its interests.
The late Vicky Phelan learned the hard way that the State was her enemy and not her friend, as did Hepatitis C campaigner the late Brigid Mccole.
Louise O’keeffe, who took Ireland to the European Court of Human Rights for failing to protect her from the abuse she suffered at primary school, also knows the depths the State will sink to protect its assets.
The Taoiseach said the State “does not have a leg to stand on” over the denied payments to disabled people but he is only doing so because the scandal was exposed by RTE Investigates.
But on the same day Leo Varadkar was lamenting about the sins of the past he and more than 70 other TDS voted to deny thousands of survivors of the State’s Mother and Baby Homes compensation.
Their decision means that around 40% of those who suffered abuse and had their lives destroyed by these hellish homes will not receive a cent from the proposed redress scheme.
Which just goes to show that while the M o t h e r and Baby Homes and the denial of the rights to the disabled and the elderly are all in the past, the thinking that allowed these abuses to take place is alive and well and living in Dail Eireann.
We learned that this is no country for old men or women