UNEMPLOYMENT CASE STUDY:Unemployment in today's Ireland affects people at all levels of society. Speechwriter MIRIAM O'CALLAGHANdescribes a period on social welfare in 2010
OUT OF the blue, I lost my job. I was lucky; before the shock redundancy, came a shock blip with the health. In that soul-and-sanity-saving way, being ‘out of work’ was only ever about that. The job was redundant. The doer wasn’t. Being the sole-earner left no time, room for self-pity.
The immediate priority was getting the children through it, keeping the roof over our head, heat in the house, food on the table. I managed it all. But only just. Those movies where seven-stone women lift ten-tonne trucks off cars with their children trapped inside? Unemployment is the musical. A lavish production in which a seven-stone woman can start to resemble a ten-tonne truck. Lemon puffs and financial dread – cheap, deadly.
That’s the great-day version. The bad one involved feeling ripped inside-out. Wandering around as a life-size, touch-and-feel anatomy exhibit, the 46A-bus blasting Major butts across glistening cecum, duodenum, spleen.
In the long, wired nights, Zadie Smith was apposite: the position of the planets, the music of the spheres, the flap of the Tiger moth's diaphanous wings in Central Africa and a whole bunch of other stuff that Makes Shit Happen. Every job-loss is lousy in its own way. Mine brought specific complications. I'd been on a semi-sabbatical after the not-so-semi blip, using the Emergency Fund for same. My daughter slotted back at her old school. My son's private one was trickier. By letter, the issue was space, notice. By phone, money. Either way, he didn't go back.
Tough at the time, it was the makings of him. He lost illusions, acquaintances, kept his sincerity, dignity, friends. Bright and diligent, he focused on what mattered, eventually going to the school he set his heart on. His sister likewise. They’re grand.
Their grandmother is reading this wearing her I-told-you-so face. My lunatic mother counselled me to accept unemployment as “a gift”! Only when regular pay again stood between me and “being idle” did I exhume her from her shallow grave, remove the spade from her skull, and thank her.
Whereupon she confessed – the whole stinking adventure broke her and my father’s hearts. “Jesus, you aged 10 years.” The provenance of those €50 notes that appeared in cupboards, pockets? A mystery. Like when friends “happened” to do a double grocery-shop. Including wine, moisturiser, ice-cream.
With unemployment, colleagues retreated. A mix of embarrassment and fear of contagion. It hurt. But they were right; I was infectious. Friends since high-babies fell like ninepins.
Ours was the generation of opportunity: university education, degrees, post-grads, good jobs, better jobs, higher salaries, glittering careers in Australia, Saudi, America. People came back to buy a home, rear the kids, look after the parents. Then the calls began – “the job is gone, nothing out there”.
Under pressure from the banks, the husbands took off to Amsterdam, Toronto, London, Shanghai. From Nanchang City came a text: “There’s myself, three French guys and seven-million Chinese”.
For months, the same few grand did the rounds-of-mortgage-desperation between us, like the Miracle Prayers, rosaries, novenas to a dead Spanish nun, our aged, ailing parents said for us all. We got together at Christmas. By Epiphany, these husbands, fathers and sons packed their new memories against the old loneliness, slipping out, alone, into the New Year dark, the children still asleep. Said one: “On the Friday-night flight from Schipol to Cork over two-thirds are Irish guys, 40s and 50s, ex-construction, engineering. The ‘redeye’ to Amsterdam Monday morning? Same.”
Now I’m back at work. Back on my feet. Getting there involved gullet-sticking choices. But I’m lucky, and I feel thankful. Despite their heavy hearts, the unemployed tread unusually lightly. Media panels on unemployment rarely, if ever, include the experts: the unemployed themselves.
From my stint on social welfare, I believe every political adviser, and government adviser, should experience the panic of not being able to pay the bills, feel the shock of losing control over their lives, know the dread of going days without a cent.
As to that “whole bunch of stuff that Makes Shit Happen”? Ireland is tackling it, making sure one particular kind never happens again. Will there be jobs for our people to come home to? I believe so, yes, but it will take time. Until then, our exiled, middle-aged workers revisit their teens, living all week for Friday night.
Last March, Miriam O’Callaghan started working with the Taoiseach on his speeches