500,000 people in food poverty – and bankers want bonuses?
According to the latest figures from the Survey on Income and Living Conditions (SILC), there are well in excess of half a million people in the country suffering from food poverty –and the news is that the bankers want a bonus? (‘Bankers’ bonuses at bailed-out lenders back on the agenda’, Irish
Independent, April 19.) Critically, the survey tells us that more than half a million men, women and children cannot afford a hot meal every second day; from morning to night they will not have had a proper meal.
And now the bankers want a bonus?
Homelessness figures are increasing exponentially: 8,000 children are being fed by the Capuchin day centre in Dublin; people are picking up charity food packets on their way to work; zero-hour contracts enforce even more poverty; the minimum wage is set well below the living wage; hundreds of people in court every week losing their homes; almost 50pc of the Irish population in receipt of some form of social transfer.
And it’s time the bankers got a bonus?
An endless stream of reports has detailed bank overcharging, wrongfully switching people from their tracker mortgages, banks losing people’s money, loss, pain and ongoing austerity still being suffered by the very people who bailed them out.
And the bankers want a bonus? If the bankers don’t get a bonus they will accept free shares in the banks instead. These very same shares paid for with the sweat, blood and tears of ordinary citizens. Paid for with the pension funds of those who worked all of their lives just to see their fund drained.
Just to support the very same bankers who now think it’s time they got a bonus.
And if the bankers don’t get their bonus or don’t receive the bank for free with an annual bestowal of shares, then we risk a “flight of bankers from the country”? Could this be true?
One wonders how many “irreplaceable” bankers we lost during the recession?
Might I suggest that any banker thinking of fleeing the economic oppression they are suffering in Ireland should look to the many excellent websites offering low-cost, one-way tickets to any destination of their choosing – and wish them ‘Bon voyage’. Glyn Carragher Ballygar, Co Galway