Sean Maher: How the pensioners of Ireland were silenced in the Budget - Kilkenny Live

The recent budget has made one thing painfully clear: Ireland has become a country where you only get what you are organised enough to demand.

For the pensioners of this country – the very people who built the foundation of our current economic success – the message from the government in this Budget is as cruel as it is dismissive. As pensioners, we do not have an aggressive, well-funded lobby machine; one must make do with whatever leftovers we throw your way.

It’s perhaps a throwback to the landlord and tenant situation that prevailed in our country for hundreds of years. At times, I think that the division that is happening in our society will eventually engulf all of society, as it did over 100 years ago now near here in Mullinavat when – at the Battle of Carrickshock in 1831 – the first to raise the issue of some changes to that which governed then.

Vulnerable

We are told to be grateful for small change, €10 increase on pensions. The reality of this is that the core State pension leaves the majority of vulnerable seniors well behind. The estimated baseline for a living wage, it sits just north of €380 a week.

Instead of structural, permanent increases that respect our senior years, the increases disappear the moment they hit our electricity bills, further pencilled in later this month or next month.

Look at who truly won in this budget. The sectors with loud voices, deep pockets, and institutional clout secured historic packages. Business groups led by IBEC warmly welcomed the changes relating to business. The agricultural sector, with a most powerful organisation, the IFA, walked away with billions for their sector – and fair play to them, it was there to be got.

Transport corporations, high earners earning over €75,000, and corporate interests backed by legal advisors and professional strategists won hands down in this Budget of Plenty.

Even public and civil service unions, through sheer organisational numbers and the threat of disruption, learned from the transport blockade, will inevitably get what they want.

Meanwhile, those who played by the rules and paid their taxes for decades are left exposed. To add insult to injury, we watch on television as individuals who actively disrupted the state and boast about owing thousands to Revenue treat non-compliance like a badge of honour, while law-abiding pensioners stretch every penny just to heat their homes.

The seeds of a ruthless ‘lobby culture’ have taken deep root in modern Ireland. Its the survival of the fittest, while there is no stopping the largesse handed out to TDs and other people who provide accommodation to thousands of people from many lands.

The loud, the powerful, and the aggressively organised take the lion's share, while the quiet and vulnerable are squeezed out.

Our existing senior advocacy groups, despite their best efforts, have fundamentally failed to match the political ruthlessness now been applied by corporate and industrial syndicates as they lobby.

They have not brought us up the steps to decent form of living. Look, people that never paid tax of any form, PRSI etc are getting more in state assistance than pensioners that worked many over 50 years in the PAYE system. The NGOs fought for them regarding a living wage of €330 at the time, about five years ago, that figure now stands at €380.

If we do not change our approach, the moment the economic tide turns and tax revenues fall, it is the pensioners of Ireland who will be hammered first and hardest. According to people in the know, there is at the most two to threee years left in this cycle of plenty.

We urgently need someone to step forward and form a powerful, nationwide pensioners’ association or union. Indeed, if some of the bigger unions could take on the task and pensioners become members of them, all the better. Unions like UNITE and SIPTU might take it up. it would really mean a lot.

We must learn the lesson this budget has taught us: if you want dignity in this country, you must organise and force the political establishment to listen.

A society that abandons its elderly to reward the loudest has lost its moral compass. It is a sad reflection on what we once prided ourselves on being: a compassionate, fair, and Christian society.

And to the younger generations who think this is not their problem—remember, time catches up with everyone. The system we allow to neglect us today is the very system that will welcome you tomorrow.

Sean Maher is a journalist based in South Kilkenny