Where did Regina get idea that her party cares?

PERHAPS it was a rush of blood but Regina Doherty’s outburst on the paucity of the Jobseeker’s Allowance beggars belief.

She has absolutely no idea, she says, ‘where people got the view that people on welfare are living the life of Riley’, before adding: ‘I couldn’t live on €198 a week.’

Now clearly the minister, right, was trying to curry favour with her audience at the Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed and full credit to that polite outfit for keeping a straight face.

For aside from the fact that the Minister for Social Protection didn’t know that the jobseekers’s weekly payment is €193, not €198, she was a little disingenuous pretending that she didn’t know exactly the identity of the culprits. For it was her own party, particularly when in coalition with Labour that was most eager to perpetuate the idea of welfare recipients living on the fat of the land.

Was Regina asleep on the backbenches when her predecessor Joan Burton thundered about welfare as a ‘lifestyle choice’ for school-leavers and about how a ‘welfare trap’ was preventing people taking jobs?

Where was she earlier this year when yet another of her predecessors in Social Protection, Leo Varadkar, practically launched his party leadership campaign on the back of a hard-hitting drive against welfare fraud, complete with advertisements proclaiming how ‘welfare cheats cheat us all’?

Regina must have been miles away when during the economic collapse, her party colleagues, echoing the views of the OECD and the IMF, repeatedly called for welfare cuts and voiced their frustration with Labour which regarded protecting core welfare payments as a red-line issue.

Perhaps Regina’s been asleep for years and doesn’t realise what party she is in. Wakey, wakey, Regina: you’re in Fine Gael, not Solidarity.