Social welfare scammers

one of my coworkers was working in the centra/franchise corner shop while claiming, so it can happen.

granted it was in london.

It's not always a good idea to believe everything that others tell you.

Not when you consider a co-habiting lone parent is not a lone parent and if they were claiming lone parent benefit that would be the scam right there.

A guy in my local town never worked a day in his life, has a council house and is operating an unlicensed taxi service for years, has been reported numerous times but nothing has been done about it. I know of 2 other guys at the exact same.

I don't know enough about the British welfare system or the media's attitude to it to comment, but in this country, our welfare system has produced a toxic culture of generations of families who are taught, from birth, that they have no responsibility whatsoever to try and support themselves by looking for paid work if they don't want to, and that it's the Government's job to give them free housing, medical care and support for all the kids they feel like churning out. The results of that can now be seen in every major city in Ireland in the form of gangs of feral kids who are free to roam around the streets attacking random passers by for the fun of it. Anyone who dares to question this, of course, is confronted with the usual howls of nonsense from the left about how it's not the poor kid's fault, it's the Government's because the kids live in poverty and have no facilities, blah blah blah. Utter nonsense. Today's modern council houses are like luxury apartments compared to the house my working class family and those of my peers grew up in. None of us became thugs because all of our parents worked for a living and brought us up to do the same. Welfare is not supposed to be a lifestyle choice, but it is now for a certain cohort of society and has been for decades.

So Gardai and NTA don't deal with unlicensed taxis, no?

They deal with some of them but some seem to get away with it.

1 of the 3 guys I mentioned got caught.

Driving a taxi is work, he'd make more by driving the taxi and claiming Family income supplement.

Have you reported them?

Yes.

No, its easy for them to make it look like they are trying to catch them but you cant force them to do their job.

Honestly, it's hard to believe. You're right to say that you can't force them to do their job.

But this particular scenario, of an unlicensed taxi driver, creates significant exposure for them. If yer man goes rogue, and assaults a passenger, or has a crash with alcohol or drugs taken, there would be questions in the Dail about their failure to act.

You do have further options;

• Go along to the next local authority policing committee meeting, and ask AGS in a public forum why they haven't acted on your reports
• Write to the local Chief Superintendent and ask why they haven't acted on your reports
• Get a local Councillor or local TD on the case to put additional pressure on them
• Get a local cranky journalist on the case to ask some difficult questions
• Write to the Head of Taxi Regulation and the CEO of NTA to ask why they haven't acted on your complaints.

For a start, it's not about "what someone’s doing with their life". It's about the significant risk of having an unlicensed taxi driver out there, dealing with vulnerable passengers, people with disabilities, people barely conscious after a night on the beer and more, in a vehicle that hasn't gone through proper safety checks and isn't insured to take paying passengers.

You'll often see on the AGS Twitter feed how someone who had little respect for one aspect of traffic law will very often be caught for multiple other offences, tax, insurance, license - so it's not a huge leap to imagine that this driver isn't exactly a paragon of safe driving.

If the scenario described here has happened, where an unlicensed driver is being ignored by the two State agencies responsible for legal compliance, then that's an important issue in itself - and needs to be addressed with the kind of escalations I described, to put a bit of manners on them for the future.

It's mad though how you'd never ask a poster here why they spend so long bitching and moaning about stuff on Boards, but you ask me why I'd spend time doing something actually constructive?

I have had meetings with AGS, not just rank and file Guards. I plan on doing some of the things you mentioned. It isn't over yet but is frustrating watching it happen and nothing being done about it. I suppose the Guards have bigger fish to fry but as you said if this guy does something stupid then it won't look good for the Guards or NTA.