Dublin’s Shame: Yanks Denied Dole!

For all the ink spilled about Ireland’s E85 billion bailout, no commentator has concerned herself with one class of victim, the dozens of unemployed Irish-Americans who acquired Irish passports in recent years expecting to take advantage of your European-style social benefits.


When I picked up my Irish passport two years ago at the consulate on Park Avenue here in New York, (might new, cheaper digs be in order?) as the lady slipped me the passport under the glass divider, I asked her where I should go to apply for the dole. She thought I was joking, but I wasn‘t.


Now it appears unlikely that Ireland’s new economic “supervisors,” the IMF and the EU, will honor the implicit commitment Ireland made to us new citizens, for we are citizens, to let us go on the dole or as you call it in some circumstances, to collect job seeker's allowance.


For centuries, we in America, have absorbed literally millions of Irish people of many generations. Now, at the time of our significant need, we, a mere dozen or so individuals probably, hardly anything compared to the migration westward across the Atlantic, had hoped to reverse the process, had wanted to make a small drawdown on the economic capital accumulated during the Celtic Tiger years.


I think it is fair to say that without the U.S. absorbing so many generations of talented Irish people, the Celtic Tiger years might not have happened.


Perhaps I should have done it sooner, but I thought it only fair to use up my American unemployment payments first. Am I to be penalized for having the honesty to not try to get two countries’ job seeker’s allowances at the same time, merely because economic conditions in Ireland have deteriorated in the meanwhile?


With the unemployment rate at about 10 percent here, and I know it is high in Ireland as well, I think we Irish Americans who have gone to the trouble and expense of acquiring the red booklet should be allowed to get job seeker’s allowance in the country of our ancestors’ birth. Better than paying it out to resident Poles or Africans, I should think.


But based on my initial inquiries, that is apparently not the case. This flawed decision to not allow me and my compatriots to go on the dole in Ireland ignores the role our country, America, has played in accepting your wandering waterfowl or whatever it is.


If this decision, imposed by non-Irish administrators, is allowed to stand and we few citizen-Yanks are not allowed to collect job seeker’s allowance, it will be a sad moment in relations between our countries.


The fact that the new budget cuts job seeker’s allowance is not my objection. I think we Yanks who seek to go on the dole should share the austerity the nation as a whole will be going through. We may not have been citizens for as long as some, but if you would just let us collect, we would be patriotic and not complain about a slight reduction from your hardly princely sum of $236 per week.


Indeed, no matter how proud I am to be a fairly newly minted Irish citizen, I am an American, too. We are known for our “can-do” spirit. Your job seeker’s allowance is only $236 a week. Even New York State unemployment payments are more than that and New York is less generous than New Jersey or Connecticut. I’d put my position to your head man over there, your Taoiseach, just don’t make me pronounce that word, if I get the opportunity.


If in recent years, Irish society has opened up to a broader spectrum of immigrants, as I’ve read, I wonder if it is really wise to use the country’s economic troubles as a reason to turn away us few Irish Americans who may choose to immigrate for the economic opportunity of going on the dole and who are already citizens.


No, it’s a sad business entirely if Ireland turns down us well-meaning, if impoverished, Americans who are willing to come to your country with our red booklets.


Some of the “coffin” ships of the 19th Century, the ones that left from Cobh harbor, had as their last sight of land, my family’s farm on Mutton’s Head, Country Cork. Your country’s emigrants would crowd the ships’ rails for a last look at their country and see our farm.


How disappointed my ancestors would be, some of them, anyway, to learn that the tit of the Irish government is off limits to their admittedly neer do well descendents.


I think Ireland evades its responsibility to its American cousins, holders of Irish passports, when it acquiesces to the decision to deny us job seeker’s allowances in the land of our patrimony and our, well, not matrimony, though if there are any single Irish women of a certain age interested in supporting a Yank like me, I’ll instruct this publication to include my email with my name.


Again, I know this is a difficult time for Ireland. But under any government, Fine Gael or Finna Fail, I think the National Republic must look beyond its current economic malaise, and take its direction from such worthy Irish and Irish American leaders as Collins, DeValera and Kennedy and let us few Yanks that need it, collect job seeker’s allowance. What better way to exercise a bit of financial independence from the IMF and the EU?


To paraphrase James Joyce:


Honor please my booklet red.

Pay me Euros

till I’m dead.

From Brussels and DC take no cue

Support a Yank

Who looks like you.