Editor’s Note

Credit where credit is due: government has been generous with cash supports for businesses whose trade has been affected by Covid-19 health policy restrictions. The final bill for 2020 isn’t in yet, but it looks like that between wage subsidies, restart grants, commercial rates waivers and now the Covid Restrictions Support Scheme, the tally will approach €6,000 million (see page 10). The outlay on Pandemic Unemployment Payments, availed of by the selfemployed and others, is expected to be c.€4,600 million by year-end. The largesse will continue in 2021, augmented in a more focused way, depending on the final shape of Brexit.

The qualifying criterion for availing of the Temporary Wage Subsidy Scheme was a Q2 yearon-year decline in turnover of at least 25%. This threshold was met by 66,500 private sector employers, 45% of the total, which meant that over the summer one in three of all private sector workers received a wage subsidy. The subsidy worked to the extent of protecting affected firms from going under immediately. Latest official data shows that from March to September there was only a 5,700 reduction in the number of employers across the economy.

Employers may survive but all their jobs will not. The number of people unemployed in Ireland has increased faster than at any time since the economy went into a tailspin in 2009. The Covid-adjusted unemployment rate that includes people receiving the Pandemic Unemployment Payment was 20% in October. That was after PUP claimants jumped by 90,000 to 295,000 due to tough Level 5 restrictions. It is estimated that 8% of PUP claimants are students, but even an 18% unemployment rate points to the gravity of the current crisis across Irish society.

Welfare payments can keep the wolf from the door, but people want the dignity of work and the opportunity to raise their income above subsistence levels. For eight months now, hundreds of thousands of people have been denied that opportunity because the Department of Health has been directing policy response to the coronavirus.

The retail and hospitality sectors are shuttered through November because 40 out of 255 ICU beds are taken up with Covid patients, most of them elderly people with underlying conditions. Health minister Stephen Donnelly is promising additional critical-care beds across the hospital system, but only at the rate of one new bed per week through 2021.

A public health emergency demands more urgency than that timeline. Including PUP recipients, the unemployment rate for 15 to 24 year-olds is currently 45%. The borrowed money funding their welfare payments would be better spent on Covid treatment facilities so those kids can get back to work.

A public health emergency demands more urgency