highest number of houses with nobody working

goz83

Watching the news there and according to the OECD, Ireland has the highest number of house-holds in the EU with nobody working.

I can't help but wonder if this is a culture rather than people being unable to find employment. I have no doubts that many people want to work and can't find work to support themselves and families, but there is also an element of laziness bred into certain families. I know a friend of my wife has a partner with many brothers and sisters, none of whom work. The parents never worked either. Makes me sad to hear that news.

Voltex

...at least three times in the last 6 months I have been told by people who I was interviewing that they were better off on the dole. The rationale that follows is that the welfare system in this state has created a barrier between a capable person to work and the opportunity to work.

People will always chose the situation that best suits them..and not for one minute do I blame or accuse the folks that turned me down in favour of welfare...but we do need to look at the systems in place.

AltAccount

But during the boom we had <4% unemployment, so where was the culture of not working then?

Is this a recent development?

General Atomic

Voltex wrote: »

...at least three times in the last 6 months I have been told by people who I was interviewing that they were better off on the dole. The rationale that follows is that the welfare system in this state has created a barrier between a capable person to work and the opportunity to work.

People will always chose the situation that best suits them..and not for one minute do I blame or accuse the folks that turned me down in favour of welfare...but we do need to look at the systems in place.

Perhaps you should offer better pay?

wolfpawnat

In many cases there is a "welfare trap". For many unskilled or non-degree qualified labour, the SW provides a roof over their heads, basic medical care and a small income. Going to work may case a decrease in aid or abolition of rent, no medical care and a little more income, but it is forced to cover more so you end up with less. It seems very all or nothing here. Yeah there is FIS and all that, but the whole system needs an overhaul.

I do think, in relation to that study, what has to be noted is the huge unemployment in Ireland at this time. I am sure during the boom it was a far far cry from that.

ballyharpat

AltAccount wrote: »

But during the boom we had <4% unemployment, so where was the culture of not working then?

Is this a recent development?

During the boom, unskilled labourers were getting e15 an hour. I the recession, an unskilled labourer is getting e70 per day.
The sense of entitlement is what's killing this country, that is the sense that people should be paid more than they are worth, the sense that people should be bailed out for not being able to pay their mortgages, the sense that no investment or price of property can go south, we are a nanny state.....

wolfpawnat

ballyharpat wrote: »

During the boom, unskilled labourers were getting e15 an hour. I the recession, an unskilled labourer is getting e70 per day.
The sense of entitlement is what's killing this country, that is the sense that people should be paid more than they are worth, the sense that people should be bailed out for not being able to pay their mortgages, the sense that no investment or price of property can go south, we are a nanny state.....

70 euro/8hrs (average working day) is 8.75, national minimum wage. That would be pretty standard I would have thought. The 15 during the boom, we all knew that they were on crazy money for unskilled labour, we also knew it couldn't last, many just wouldn't accept it.

It is a basic human right to have a roof over your head, does that mean it should be free, no. But even the unemployed need a home, and though in most cases those on RAS and RA have a large portion of their rent paid for them, they still have to fork out a bit themselves. I do not believe in debt forgiveness btw, I am in the "alter loan repayments to fit lowered income" category.

strandroad

AltAccount wrote: »

But during the boom we had <4% unemployment, so where was the culture of not working then?

Is this a recent development?

It's not about unemployment as such; my friend grew up in an area where if you added all dodgy unemployed, dodgy lone parents, dodgy bad backs... you'd be left with isolated households with people actually working even back then. His stories are amazing. There are plenty of ways to play the system if you're willing, not just the dole, and I don't think there's a cap per household, even today?

SimonQuinlank

Perhaps if the government actually even slightly bothered to address the unemployment crisis more households would be working.But they seem happy enough to continue with farcical schemes like jobridge which is killing the skilled/semi skilled labour market and creating free labour for their business cronies.

Voltex

General Atomic wrote: »

Perhaps you should offer better pay?

perhaps you should have asked what the job offer was?

wexie

mhge wrote: »

It's not about unemployment as such; my friend grew up in an area where if you added all dodgy unemployed, dodgy lone parents, dodgy bad backs... you'd be left with isolated households with people actually working even back then. His stories are amazing. There are plenty of ways to play the system if you're willing, not just the dole, and I don't think there's a cap per household, even today?

Lets not forget that the 'only 4%' still works out to be about 100 THOUSAND people :eek:.

That were unemployed at a time we were importing polish, lithuanians, latvians and god knows what else by the busload.

I don't really care what excuses there are, out of those 100 THOUSAND people a lot could have had jobs if they wanted.

ballyharpat

General Atomic wrote: »

Perhaps you should offer better pay?

If people are as hungry for work as we are led to believe then even if it were a minimum wage job, the post should be filled, however, when a pay packet has to compete with dole, medical card, rent allowance and the other benefits, it's difficult to compete with someone who is basically still living at home sucking from the teat, except we will replace teat with taxpayer....

hfallada

There is a culture in Ireland regarding entitlement. People feel they should be entitled to free health care, free housing and unemployment. I think of council housing being the obvious. People think they should have a new modern home provided to them paid for by the tax payer even through they never worked once in their life.

Germany reformed their welfare system and the reforms were very unpopular. But now the reforms are one of the reasons why their economy is doing so well. People have an incentive to work

SpaceTime

I think though people are quite quick to forget that we have had historically quite high unemployment because we create very few blue-collar jobs and really never have done at any stage other than during that construction bubble.

We created loads of them during the construction bubble, because we were manufacturing unnecessary houses for imaginary consumers.

Germany is one of the few remaining western economies that has a big blue collar work force making high value-added goods that get exported all over the world.
The US used to have, but they've off-shrored absolutely everything and the UK basically seems to have decided that it can run its economy on financial services.

I don't think we're comparing like with like when we compare Germany and Ireland there really is a hell of a lot more to it than just unemployment assistance payment policies.

I think the anglophone countries in general are massively over-relying on "the knowledge economy" for future growth.

It may mean that say US GDP stays relatively high because companies like Apple, Google, MS, and a heap of smaller ones all make lots of sales, but the jobs are not really being created in the US other than at the very highest level.

Ireland's just not pulling in overseas investment for blue collar jobs either, it seems to be all aimed at IT and increasingly at R&D lead investment and financial service, IT Support etc etc . That's great, but it will not create jobs for people who are geared up to working in practical jobs, it will just continue to create jobs for people who have degrees and can operate in that sphere.

Sleepy

Our welfare system and minimum wage levels make us too expensive for a German style manufacturing economy and that's assuming we could match their vocational educational system. While those building Merc's and Beamers might be low down on the skilled worker food-chain, most of them aren't exactly unskilled.

spank_inferno

It should be noted that this statistic may seem overly high because a lot of adults have simply dropped out of the labour force.

Labour force participation among adults 18-66 is far lower than in the boom times.

So they are not necessarily a burden on the tax payer.

spank_inferno

hfallada wrote: »

There is a culture in Ireland regarding entitlement. People feel they should be entitled to free health care, free housing and unemployment. I think of council housing being the obvious. People think they should have a new modern home provided to them paid for by the tax payer even through they never worked once in their life.

Germany reformed their welfare system and the reforms were very unpopular. But now the reforms are one of the reasons why their economy is doing so well. People have an incentive to work

True... Though it should be noted that Germany spends much more on welfare than Ireland does (as a % of GDP).

ardmacha

True... Though it should be noted that Germany spends much more on welfare than Ireland does (as a % of GDP).

More on welfare, more on education, more on defence etc, but no deficit as they actually collect taxes to pay for these things.

spank_inferno

ardmacha wrote: »

More on welfare, more on education, more on defence etc, but no deficit as they actually collect taxes to pay for these things.

well, they are currently running a defecit. Hiwever its within managable tresholds so is no big deal.

Your right on the nose though.
Ireland still has a comparatively large GDP.
Unfortunately the government refuses to tax it sensibly.

No Pants

hfallada wrote: »

There is a culture in Ireland regarding entitlement. People feel they should be entitled to free health care, free housing and unemployment. I think of council housing being the obvious. People think they should have a new modern home provided to them paid for by the tax payer even through they never worked once in their life.

This. Take a look at the State Benefits forum some time. Plenty of "Living at home, cramping my style, managed to get up the duff, what's the best way to get my own gaff at others' expense" posts.

SpaceTime

Sleepy wrote: »

Our welfare system and minimum wage levels make us too expensive for a German style manufacturing economy and that's assuming we could match their vocational educational system. While those building Merc's and Beamers might be low down on the skilled worker food-chain, most of them aren't exactly unskilled.

The problem is that those companies and that skill took about 200 years to build up. We don't have that kind of time even though we can aim for adding more high-skilled manufacturing to the economy it's not going to happen quickly.

The UK has basically lost most of that engineering skill since Thatcher converted them to being totally dependent on the financial markets and "the City". They take decades and even centuries to build up and they have to be maintained.

I honestly think in the medium-term we're just going to have to keep trying to attract more FDI and hopefully trying to spin off some local business.

The food and drinks sector's also an area where Ireland has huge potential but it needs to companies to invest in branding and R&D in a much bigger way. Something like only 30% of our food exports are branded, value-added products at the moment and there's huge scope to expand that.

Exporting millions of tons of beef isn't the way forward, we need to be exporting high-end, high priced premium products. The likes of Bailey's and certain other brands with global reach show you how big a deal this can be.

....

What's happened in Ireland over the last couple of centuries is that blue-collar workers just emigrate as they cannot find jobs here. So, they have historically ended up in the UK (less so now), the US, Canada, Australia etc.

As you can see at present, our blue collar workers (and many of our expensively trained technically skilled people) are going to Canada and Australia where there's a mining boom because there's just no industry to employ them here while low-skilled blue-collar workers who would otherwise be absorbed into decent, stable employment are just sitting around unemployed.

Spain suffers from a bit of this too and the North of England etc etc.

I think we really need to look at trying to encourage EU companies to re-invest in Europe rather than outsourcing everything to China and other cheaper places, which is what's happening at the moment.

Ireland won't be able to solve this alone.


---

We also have big scope in areas like IT, but it will not create low-skilled jobs and a % of the population can't do high-skilled jobs unless we pull in more electronics manufacturing like Intel, although it's very hard to compete against rock-bottom costs in China etc.

The other issue at the moment is that the Government urgently needs to do something about high rents and more urgently high commercial rates.
One of the few spaces where low skilled jobs are available is in retail and distribution and the state's own policies and NAMA are killing those businesses.

The knock on effect of that will be to put retail workers, shop keepers, distribution agents, warehouse staff and loads of small manufacturing businesses that supply shops and restaurants (especially small food businesses) out of business as the retailers vanish off the streets.

---

Incentivising major infrastructure projects would be a good one too.

Why not give the telecoms companies a tax break to rollout fibre-to-home for example?
It would create loads of jobs digging trenches, laying ducts, building cabinets, installing sockets in people's homes and would have a big spin off in terms of growing the potential for rural businesses to reach global markets online?

Sleepy

Unfortunately, I think the solution to providing blue collar work wouldn't be very popular as it would be to reduce/remove our minimum wage and have welfare rates that reduce over time to a subsistence level that would encourage people to take low paid work (similar to the German model) thus allowing manufacturing businesses to find a workforce here). Something would probably need to be done about energy costs too though if we could cut through some of the red-tape and planning objections to wind farm proposals etc. that could be tackled in a decade or two.

The problem seems to me to be the chasm that would emerge between the incomes of those capable of securing employment in our currently viable industries and those who'd be working in this new manufacturing sector. Our society doesn't seem to like the notion of talent and effort being rewarded so I can't see this being acceptable to large amounts of the electorate. I think it would also risk social problems as such a massive divide in earning levels would lead to a very segmented property market with certain areas becoming almost no-go zones.

wolfpawnat

Sleepy wrote: »

Our welfare system and minimum wage levels make us too expensive for a German style manufacturing economy and that's assuming we could match their vocational educational system. While those building Merc's and Beamers might be low down on the skilled worker food-chain, most of them aren't exactly unskilled.

Min wage and SW cannot come down until the price of living comes down. €1.50 min for 2 litres of milk means people have to be able to eat. And with another €50 going on a gas bill, people need to pay utilities.

Sleepy

The numbers on long-term welfare with Sky Satellite dishes, cars, regular trips to the pub, smoking 20 a day and going on sun holidays would suggest otherwise.

hfallada

spank_inferno wrote: »

True... Though it should be noted that Germany spends much more on welfare than Ireland does (as a % of GDP).

Yes but they have one of the oldest populations in the world. They would have a lot of pensions to pay. But unlike in Ireland, your pension depends on how much tax you have paid. If you earn €50k pa but your friends earn €25k pa. You have a pension that is twice as much as your friend as you paid double.

I would part time and out of the €160 I make a week. I pay no PRSI and my employer pays like €8 a week. Im not contributing fairly to my pension in the future.

OMD

goz83 wrote: »

Watching the news there and according to the OECD, Ireland has the highest number of house-holds in the EU with nobody working.

I can't help but wonder if this is a culture rather than people being unable to find employment. I have no doubts that many people want to work and can't find work to support themselves and families, but there is also an element of laziness bred into certain families. I know a friend of my wife has a partner with many brothers and sisters, none of whom work. The parents never worked either. Makes me sad to hear that news.

But what does the statistic mean?
Scenario A: 4 households of 1 person all unemployed. Total unemployed 4
Scenario B: 4 household of 5 people. 4 in each unemployed but 1employed. Total unemployed 16.

This "statistic" implies scenario A is much worse than B.
We all know our unemployment rate is high. It is not the highest in the OECD so this kind of "statistic" is meaningless.

Euro Area unemployment July 2013 12.1%
Ireland Unemployment Sept 2013 13.4%. We are not much worse than the rest. Take out Germany & Austria and we are probably average of the rest

SpaceTime

Sleepy wrote: »

Unfortunately, I think the solution to providing blue collar work wouldn't be very popular as it would be to reduce/remove our minimum wage and have welfare rates that reduce over time to a subsistence level that would encourage people to take low paid work (similar to the German model) thus allowing manufacturing businesses to find a workforce here). Something would probably need to be done about energy costs too though if we could cut through some of the red-tape and planning objections to wind farm proposals etc. that could be tackled in a decade or two.

The problem seems to me to be the chasm that would emerge between the incomes of those capable of securing employment in our currently viable industries and those who'd be working in this new manufacturing sector. Our society doesn't seem to like the notion of talent and effort being rewarded so I can't see this being acceptable to large amounts of the electorate. I think it would also risk social problems as such a massive divide in earning levels would lead to a very segmented property market with certain areas becoming almost no-go zones.

The reason for the German economy's success is not recent harsh anti-welfare laws adopted by Merkel and Co. It's down to decades of economic growth based on high-tech physical products that cannot be replicated easily elsewhere.

Germany has heaps of small and medium companies that have ultra-high tech engineering-led products and they make them in Germany because Made in Germany still carries a premium over Made in --- anywhere else almost.

The only industry in Ireland that carries that level of brand kudos is food where Irish meat products in say Belgium carry up to a 70% price premium as they're perceived as ultra high quality.

Germany's technology-driven industrial economy produces good, well-paid blue-collar jobs and lots of them.

Ireland's financial services / IT / big pharma economy produces well-paid jobs for qualified graduates and very few jobs for blue-collar workers or where it does they tend to be badly paid relative to other markets like Canada, Australia etc which are attracting our would be blue collar workers due to their resource-bubble/boom i.e. in mining and spin-off industries.

The reality is that a % of any given population cannot function at the level where they would need degrees and postgraduate qualifications to get a basic job. So, they end up being marginalised.

We can potentially create low-skilled jobs in the services and food sectors, but we're not doing nearly enough to take up the slack that the construction bubble left us with.

This is not going to be an overnight solution. Ireland's facing at least a decade or more of relatively high unemployment until some kind of major economic change happens that takes up the labour market slack.

We could streamline the welfare system to remove any glitches that make it more attractive to stay on the dole than to go into work. That doesn't necessarily mean slashing rates / punishing people.

The current system has stupid catch-22 situations that withdraw supports when someone gets a pretty low-paid job. Instead, we should be removing cash payments and leaving some of the other supports intact and trying to up-skill the person to push them up the career ladder so they can fully unplug from the welfare system.

All the current setup does is encourage people not to take up low paid work.

....

I am very concerned at the ever-increasing costs being levied on small business and retail in particular as it's going to push more people onto the dole queues who will be unable to find jobs elsewhere as they're low-skilled workers.

...

Big issues in Ireland:

1) Property / rent - There is still a huge % of the economy being syphoned off by investors who are sucking huge rents out of commercial and other properties. Upward only rents, NAMA keeping property off the market to put a price floor under it etc etc etc.

2) High energy costs that seem to constantly keep rising.

3) Local authorities taxing the hell out of retailers and businesses.

4) Slow action on dealing with debt restructuring.

5) Dysfunctional banks that can't lend.

SpaceTime

OMD wrote: »

But what does the statistic mean?
Scenario A: 4 households of 1 person all unemployed. Total unemployed 4
Scenario B: 4 household of 5 people. 4 in each unemployed but 1employed. Total unemployed 16.

This "statistic" implies scenario A is much worse than B.
We all know our unemployment rate is high. It is not the highest in the OECD so this kind of "statistic" is meaningless.

Euro Area unemployment July 2013 12.1%
Ireland Unemployment Sept 2013 13.4%. We are not much worse than the rest. Take out Germany & Austria and we are probably average of the rest

The average number of persons per household in Ireland is 2.7, but bear in mind that Ireland's population's heavily skewed towards younger generations so a lot of those persons are >18.

Sleepy

SpaceTime, I'd agree with many of your points there but I think you over-estimate how well paid blue-collar jobs are in Germany. I'd also take issue with the notion that our current tax-base can support "debt restructuring" on any large scale and the problem of the Local Authorities is never going to be fixed as it requires a massive consolidation which will lead to job cuts in a sector our government run scared from.

Tigerandahalf

Many of the blue collar jobs in Germany would not be there were it not for the euro currency bringing down the cost of their goods. They are riding on the back of a cheap currency.
In relation to Ireland the jobs just aren't there for blue collar workers and even for graduates. Yes we have produced too many graduates and that is still an issue today with colleges pushing out too many graduates with no jobs on stream.
The household statistic is just that - it can easily hide the story behind it. Many young people in Spain for example would be back living with their parents as they would not be getting rent allowance or dole, thus those statistics would be skewed.

skafish

Sleepy wrote: »

The numbers on long-term welfare with Sky Satellite dishes, cars, regular trips to the pub, smoking 20 a day and going on sun holidays would suggest otherwise.

And this is a huge part of the problem. Why should anybody take up a "real" job, when they can stay on the scratch, and enjoy a higher standard of living than the mugs paying for them? Then throw in a few nixers here and there, and you are really on the pigs back.

Personally, I am getting royally pi**ed off at being taxed to the hilt, while every day I see people whose life style I am paying for enjoy a higher standard of living than I can hope for.

strongback

I'm still annoyed with the bankers.

queensinead

ballyharpat wrote: »

During the boom, unskilled labourers were getting e15 an hour. I the recession, an unskilled labourer is getting e70 per day.
The sense of entitlement is what's killing this country, that is the sense that people should be paid more than they are worth, the sense that people should be bailed out for not being able to pay their mortgages, the sense that no investment or price of property can go south, we are a nanny state.....

The sense of "entitlement" and greed on the part of employers is amazing too...

The sense that they should be "entitled" to have somebody working for them for nothing under "Jobridge", a form of corporate welfare that is being disgracefully abused.

The sense that employees are like slaves without lives, needs, commitments,who can be offered zero hour contracts and should be grateful for the work

The sense that it's ok to invite someone for interview and never contact them again because, well, there are a lot more where they came from

There are a lot of things "killing this country"

Sigourney

strongback wrote: »

I'm still annoyed with the bankers.

Feckers.

SpaceTime

The household statistic is also different in Ireland because there is a large % of households would have kids.

You'd be surprised at how many households in some countries are 'three generational' or are adult offspring and parents in their 60s.

SpaceTime

queensinead wrote: »

The sense of "entitlement" and greed on the part of employers is amazing too...

The sense that they should be "entitled" to have somebody working for them for nothing under "Jobridge", a form of corporate welfare that is being disgracefully abused.

The sense that employees are like slaves without lives, needs, commitments,who can be offered zero hour contracts and should be grateful for the work

The sense that it's ok to invite someone for interview and never contact them again because, well, there are a lot more where they came from

There are a lot of things "killing this country"

Yeah, there's a lot of that going on too.

I think before people start ranting and raving about how people have a sense of entitlement compared to Germany, they should also realise that we have probably one of the most, if not the most 'flexible' labour market in the EU.

In most countries, companies couldn't have downsized (i.e. laid off loads of people and put them on the dole) in the first place when the economy contracted.

Some of the T&Cs of contracts here are more like the US than continental Europe.

Mr. teddywinkles

People on here seem to forget that there's plenty of well educated people with degrees leaving this country to find work. And just because IT is doing well at moment. Does that mean we keep churning out these type of graduates indefinately. No different that the construction sector as far as im concerned.

lmimmfn

well most households are better off on the dole than working( oh i forgot that got edited out ), so wheres the suprise?

OMD

lmimmfn wrote: »

well most households are better off on the dole than working( oh i forgot that got edited out ), so wheres the suprise?

Totally untrue but carry on.

murphaph

ardmacha wrote: »

More on welfare, more on education, more on defence etc, but no deficit as they actually collect taxes to pay for these things.

To be honest I wouldn't mind paying German taxes if I got German levels of service but we won't. You don't see the shoddiness here that you see in Ireland. More attention to detail.

Anyway, interesting that you mention the military. Germany is a committed NATO member and has a significant military spend which Ireland does not, so there's more money in Ireland to spend on more social things like Education and health. The problems lie mostly in HOW the money is spent in Ireland, not that there's none of it. The HSE has proven time and time again that more money is not the solution to all the problems. German doctors simply don't earn the lavish salaries of their Irish counterparts, so there are more of them to go around (in a city like Berlin there are doctors surgeries literally everywhere and they are usually specialists, so I don't need to see a consultant about a particular problem, I can just go to my local specialist)

Irish education also saw money thrown at it but we've tumbled down the OECD rankings for maths and science. There's more to it than just increasing taxation and hoping for the best.

As an aside, it should also be noted that much of Germany's social protection spend is on WORKING people like me. My son can go to a heavily subsidised Kindergarten (we pay just €150 a month or so and when he turns 3 we will pay nothing). An unemployed parent would get only a part time child care voucher as the state deems them to have a reduced need compared to someone working full time. Working people don't feel as hard done by here because of such things.

SpaceTime

I think when you compare 'traditional services' like Health and Education which have massive legacy issues to modern Irish public services e.g. take the NCT or something like that, and it's like night and day.

One's modern and efficient and accountable the other's a heaving mess of religious institutions that are getting big cheques to provide outsourced services.

The HSE and Department of Education have, in reality, major problems with control over how money is spent.
You've massive control by religious charities and then you've got massive control by very powerful professionals and endless vested interests (including community lobbying) that is never dealt with.

If you take something like the hospital system. We do actually need to centralise very specialist services into major centres of excellence with outreach centres in the local hospitals that can do on-going maintenence e.g. deliver chemotherapy in a small hospital that's been planned by say Cork University Hospital or Vincents or whatever. But, instead that's fought against and everyone wants a full cancer treatment facility in every local hospital which is just not possible if you want to actually get cured of cancer as the technology and expertise involved is too specialist and expensive.

Consultants' salaries are too high as are a lot of other medical professionals across the whole system. The issue with that is that the HSE sees itself as competing with economic bubble economies like Australia which is vastly overpaying public health professionals and pulling people out of public systems in Ireland and Britain at the moment. There's nothing we can do about that but we should start recognising continental qualifications in medicine and encouraging some of those people in.

We should also look at locking medical graduates into the health system on contract for say 4 or 5 years.

There's also a huge problem with the whole way that professional development and career paths are handled here for doctors, nurses and other professionals in the health system (although to a lesser extent in more modern professions).

The doctors are treated like slaves as juniors and given no proper development path and they are all aiming at this lucrative jackpot of becoming 'the consultant' who gets paid a fortune for a short period of their career.

We need to have it run much more like a normal employment system i.e. you get position and title as you move up through the profession and have normal and reasonable hours. We would then have a load of specialists who were not at consultant level of pay.

Consultants' pay also needs to come down big time.

There are also significant problems with control and monitoring of spending in the Irish health system because there appears to be no integrated accounts system that can show you the entire health system i.e. all HSE, the independent (but fully funded) hospitals, the charities that are outsourced services to, the commercial companies that are outsourced to etc etc.

We need a hell of a lot more detail on how spending happens.

There also seems to be a lot of issues in the system with administrators being promoted to management on the basis of seniority (time served) rather than brining in professional management or at the very least insisting that those people do a masters in management to get a promotion.

The result is that we've administration, not management and that tends to create status-quo lock-in.

....

Education suffers from fragmentation because of religious divides and gender divides.
We have too many schools because we have the whole thing divided up into various flavours of catholic school based on what religious order set them up, various protestant schools, educate together then emerged as a response to the complete lack of secular education and it keeps fragmenting more and more.

Every school has overheads notably : buildings, heating and very expensive management overheads in terms of school principals and vice principals.

That spend means that we cannot deliver education in rural schools, we can't employ enough teachers and our class sizes go up and results go down.

I would propose that we do this:

1) Merge the school management systems in areas so that one principal and vice principal runs a group of schools in a given suburb/town rather than having say 6 or 7 principals. The existing principals could simply be retired out and not replaced.

2) Begin merging the schools using existing buildings i.e. put all the juniors into one, all the seniors into another etc and share the other facilities between them.

3) As time goes on, create single campus schools.

Religious education would just have to be provided for outside of school hours. Maybe they could have after-school classes or whatever for people who want to use the space.

....

We aren't being radical in Ireland at all. We've allowed a victorian health care and a victorian education system that was created by charitable religious organisations to become the public system without almost any reform at all!

I'm not on some kind of anti-religious agenda here, but I think that you can provide cost effective, excellent public services but you cannot do them on the basis of having a different school for every religious order and all this endless fragmentation. Religious education really needs to be left up to the parents and religious organisations to deal with out of hours. If they want to, perhaps the schools could be made available as classroom space for preparing for communions etc etc on the weekends or in the evenings.

---

Illustration of fragmentation:

Scotland : (Soruce: Scottish Govt website)
Primary 2,153
Secondary 376
Special 193
Population : 5.295 million

Republic of Ireland
Primary: 3,300 (Schooldays.ie)
Secondary: 723
Special : unknown (couldn't find stats quickly)
Population: 4.589 million

Ireland does have a bit of a baby boom at the moment, but that should be taken up by larger schools, not more fragmentation and overheads.

Babybooms also disappear so you will end up with empty schools, too many principals etc instead of just expanded complexes with more space and reduced class sizes when it passes.

---

We need to benchmark what we are actually doing against countries like France, Germany, Belgium, the UK etc.
From what I can see Ireland's operating in a bubble where we see these things as totally normal because we were all brought up in them. It's even worse if you're a health or education professional as you're an insider and brought up through the system.

Something has to change though as we cannot continue to deliver overpriced, poor quality services because we just cave in to ever vested interest that we encounter.

Injecting a good dose of democracy and accountability into the health and education systems would be a start. I'd like to see for example, a town / county education budget being allocated by a Local Education Authority that had to balance its books and be accountable to the local population directly. E.g. a mix of elected parents, teachers and local directly elected reps.

Health really needs to be coordinated as a hub and spoke system from the big regional centres of excellence at the hospital level and from community clinics at the local level.

.....

The other VERY big one is that we need to completely shake up local governments.

I'd propose :

Maybe 6 county councils replacing all the existing ones and based on population / geographical spread not just random historical grounds. Each would have a council and a direct-elected regional mayor.

Towns and areas of cities of similar size to a large town could simply have a directly elected mayor + a very small council to keep an eye on him/her.

Keep the existing county structure for sign posting, the GAA, and anything tourism / historical related but they should be as relevant to local government as the historical provinces are i.e. they're just historical references..


Sorry for the very long post, but I just think we keep demanding more spending on these daft systems that just burn it instead of reforming the systems to make them deliver effective services.

Money won't fix these problems and it definitely didn't fix them during the the boom/bubble era when it was no object!

notharrypotter

Merge the school management systems in areas so that one principal and vice principal runs a group of schools in a given suburb/town rather than having say 6 or 7 principals. The existing principals could simply be retired out and not replaced.

I think this is a good idea but you may be overestimating the number of schools an most smaller towns so savings are likely to be minimal.
Most small to medium towns would have 2=> 3 primary schools and a similar number of secondary schools.
Or do you equate a Principal = a Principal regardless of Primary qualification vs. Secondary qualification?


Now if you are proposing some "Administrator" with zero professional knowledge of education then that's another problem => too many bean counters already involved.

Begin merging the schools using existing buildings i.e. put all the juniors into one, all the seniors into another etc and share the other facilities between them.

Some clarification please

All junior infants in one, and senior infants in another while first class is in a third?
This could get interesting very quickly.

Any parent with school going children more than a year apart will testify to the absurdness of this kind of proposal.

Looks good on paper or as a part of some political manifesto but sucks in the real world.

The practicalities of amalgamating smaller rural schools are not simple either.

For a start many of the smaller schools have Teacher-Principals so no saving here.

Many rural schools were sited based on the parish and how far it was practicable to travel.

In more remote areas has the number of enrolments is falling (so too in the centre of some of our larger urban areas).

However there is not that many of conveniently located groupings to permit wholesale consolidation.

Maybe 6 county councils replacing all the existing ones and based on population / geographical spread not just random historical grounds. Each would have a council and a direct-elected regional mayor.

Towns and areas of cities of similar size to a large town could simply have a directly elected mayor + a very small council to keep an eye on him/her.

There is enough "Management" layers in Irish Government already.
Plans are amended on a regular basis to facilitate development based on special interest as oppose to real need.

Some proper mechanism of oversight and transparency where decision making is concerned would prove more useful.

SpaceTime

Sure it can't be done. The current system is grand.

Forget it.

Im suggesting getting rid of up to half the school principals.
For example boys and girls national schools do not need to exist.
Many are right next to each other. Start there.

Rural schools obviously can't be merged if there's nothing to merge. Urban schools could very easily be though by starting with merging the management and gradually merging the facilities. The more urban schools get merged the more resources are available for rural schools !

In most towns and city suburbs several schools are usually in walking distance from each other.
That's where you can start merging.

As for my proposal on county councils I suggested getting down to 6 or 7 of them and increasing the power and role of very small very accountable mayoral setups for towns and urban areas.

The idea would be to cut out duplicated services and give the mayors actual power to get rid of the endless committee type indecisive mess we currently have where decisions are effectively taken by city and county managers and councils rubber stamp them at enormous bureaucratic expense with very unclear accountability.

You need slim, efficient, effective and democratically accountable government. What we have at local level is a bloated system that gives very poor levels of accountability as it's unclear who is responsible for what.

If you'd a strong mayor system if you're services were poor you'd vote the mayor out of office.

That's not how the system works here as everything is as clear as mud.

Apologies if I'm coming across as s bit ratty but this country tends to come up with a million and one reasons why reform can't be done rather than just getting on with it.

The level of inertia is just ridiculous. We've systems that have been completely unreformed since the 19th century.

A massive shake up is very long overdue in all sorts of areas if we've any hope of getting the show back back on the road and ensuring that we don't just keep repeating the same errors.

murphaph

Yep, abolutely LOADS of places Ireland could save money through structural reforms and changes to existing working practice. We don't need HR or (to an extent) IT and other back office tasks being duplicated across God knows how many local authorities when much of that could be centralised. Look at the likes of Lidl or Aldi....one or two locations in the country from which all HR, IT, payroll etc. is run. Free hotlines for the staff to call if they have queries. It's the attitude of "feck it, it's only taxpayers' money" that is preventing such reforms and of course the lack of political courage required to fire public servants once their positions have been made redundant (see the example of the binmen in Dun Laoghaire Rathdown not being fired after the council contracted out the service to a private company. "Somehow" these binmen have all been found appropriate replacement work within the council.

Show me some willingness to cut the waste (and that means redundancies or it's just a scam) and I'll show you willingness for increased taxes.

robp

SpaceTime wrote: »

We should also look at locking medical graduates into the health system on contract for say 4 or 5 years.

Nice idea but sounds too much like bonded labour to be permitted by labour laws.

SpaceTime wrote: »

There's also a huge problem with the whole way that professional development and career paths are handled here for doctors, nurses and other professionals in the health system (although to a lesser extent in more modern professions).

The doctors are treated like slaves as juniors and given no proper development path and they are all aiming at this lucrative jackpot of becoming 'the consultant' who gets paid a fortune for a short period of their career.

We need to have it run much more like a normal employment system i.e. you get position and title as you move up through the profession and have normal and reasonable hours. We would then have a load of specialists who were not at consultant level of pay.

Being a consultant is not like a normal job. It is not a skill set based on experience as junior doc. Its takes a major investment in expertise and examinations. Training positions are being dramatically increased in Irish hospitals. So this problem is being addressed.
....

SpaceTime wrote: »

I would propose that we do this:

1) Merge the school management systems in areas so that one principal and vice principal runs a group of schools in a given suburb/town rather than having say 6 or 7 principals. The existing principals could simply be retired out and not replaced.

2) Begin merging the schools using existing buildings i.e. put all the juniors into one, all the seniors into another etc and share the other facilities between them.

3) As time goes on, create single campus schools.

Where is the hard evidence that this would save money? Most Irish people live in towns of 10,000 or more. In most of these towns there are multiple Catholic schools. Choice in religious denomination is only a small driver of the number of schools in Ireland.

SpaceTime wrote: »

Illustration of fragmentation:

Scotland : (Soruce: Scottish Govt website)
Primary 2,153
Secondary 376
Special 193
Population : 5.295 million

Republic of Ireland
Primary: 3,300 (Schooldays.ie)
Secondary: 723
Special : unknown (couldn't find stats quickly)
Population: 4.589 million

Ireland does have a bit of a baby boom at the moment, but that should be taken up by larger schools, not more fragmentation and overheads.

Babybooms also disappear so you will end up with empty schools, too many principals etc instead of just expanded complexes with more space and reduced class sizes when it passes.

Your not comparing like with like. Scotland has a population concentrated in narrow band from Glasgow through Edinburgh, Dundee to Aberdeen. Its a very limited area of land comparable only to Leinster. Outside of Dublin, the Irish population is very widely distributed. The economy of scale is very marginal with primary schools. In Ireland you only need around 100 kids to make a primary school efficient. Overheads are not a major cost in schools. Salaries are overwhelmingly the dominant part of the budget. Amalgamation generates its own costs, its slow and not likely to generate major saving with out dropping quality.
The most important argument against it is simply that the main way to generate savings from this reorganisation would be derived from bigger schools and bigger class sizes which is not at all desirable.

Tigerandahalf

This thread has gone off topic.

Icepick

spank_inferno wrote: »

It should be noted that this statistic may seem overly high because a lot of adults have simply dropped out of the labour force.

Labour force participation among adults 18-66 is far lower than in the boom times.

So they are not necessarily a burden on the tax payer.

That actually means that they are an even bigger burden. They are on welfare - maybe even better benefits than as unemployed - and there is a smaller chance that they will pay it off in the future, unless the welfare system is reformed.

Icepick

hfallada wrote: »

I would part time and out of the €160 I make a week. I pay no PRSI and my employer pays like €8 a week. Im not contributing fairly to my pension in the future.

No worries, you won't get much. Current OAPs are living in the pensions golden age, esp. the ones with little or no lifetime contribution.

lmimmfn

OMD wrote: »

Totally untrue but carry on.

Not my words, was an ERSI paper, was toned down after a leak, but even the toned down version said the same, mostly due to cost of childcare, mortgage, commute costs, healthcare costs due to medical card etc.

maninasia

Being a consultant is not like a normal job. It is not a skill set based on experience as junior doc. Its takes a major investment in expertise and examinations. Training positions are being dramatically increased in Irish hospitals. So this problem is being addressed.

What's a normal job? It's just a job at the end of the day, even if it requires a certain level of experience and qualifications and responsibility.

What's the point of offering more training places if there are not enough consultant jobs or money to support them already to go around in the current system. Activate your brain man!

The problem in Ireland has been pointed out very well by the earlier poster, Ireland is stuck in a Victorian 19th century paternal talk down mindset with institutions from the 19th century.

Ireland needs real change, not a little bit off here and there.

The insiders don't like change because it threatens their positions, their salaries, the place in society, their self worth. They'll justify it by saying somebody somewhere else gets paid the same or more, even when it's largely irrelevant.

In Ireland it seems there are doctors and then there are consultants. Meanwhile trying to see a consultant can take months and months and cost an arm and a leg. Because of this many people don't even bother going to appointments until the medical condition worsens. In other countries you can simply walk into a clinic on the street and see a specialist that day. They might not have an internship from Chicago General but they will be well trained and deal with you right away in a medically effective manner and a cost effective manner.

The system is not setup to look after the interests of patients properly, nor does it look after the interests of the average doctor, who is never going to become a consultant!


The situation for education and teaching is similar. Religion is tolerated to a massive degree, when it has no place in the education system. One size fits all education is also extremely outdated in the 21st century.

As for the 'social contract', that simply is not working, because there is not enough money to pay for this unequal contract. And yet we keep paying people and families to stay at home and do nothing for years and years and sometimes their whole life. Your life, your family your responsibility is going to be more and more the catchphrase because , simply put, the money isn't there to support anything else.

dissed doc

goz83 wrote: »

Watching the news there and according to the OECD, Ireland has the highest number of house-holds in the EU with nobody working.

I can't help but wonder if this is a culture rather than people being unable to find employment. I have no doubts that many people want to work and can't find work to support themselves and families, but there is also an element of laziness bred into certain families. I know a friend of my wife has a partner with many brothers and sisters, none of whom work. The parents never worked either. Makes me sad to hear that news.

Why would they work when you (probably) earn enough in taxes for them to get cash into the hand every month and medical cards (also paid for by you (probably)).