Social welfare problems for immigrants

PROBLEMS in accessing social welfare are forcing emigrants, even legal ones, into very difficult circumstances.

Orla Ní Eilí of the Clare Immigrant Support Centre said that in some cases, three generations of one family are living in one room, while other people have become homeless and some have found themselves without enough to eat.
“We’re seeing more and more hard cases. People are becoming homeless, while they’re waiting to see if they’ll meet the conditions for the habitual residency condition, which allows them to claim social welfare. In some cases, grandparents, parents and children are all living in one room of a friend or relation’s house. People are falling through the cracks and some of them don’t have enough to eat. They may have come here and worked in a manual job and that wouldn’t have given them a chance to learn a lot of English. Now they can’t get a job like that and they don’t have the language to try and get another job,” she added.
Ms Ní Eilí said that many of those who are undocumented in Clare may have good reasons for their status. “They may have arrived legally on a work permit, as a student or through their partner. Then the loss of their job or a break-up can put them into a limbo-like status. People can get frozen with fear and they won’t respond to letters from the immigration services.”
She said that a habitual residency condition for accessing social welfare, which requires that people show they have been in Ireland for two years, is causing severe difficulties, even for people who are in Ireland legally.
“It’s causing terrible grief. People mightn’t be able to show proof of address because they may have been sharing accommodation and didn’t get bills in their own name. They may have had jobs where they weren’t getting documentation so they didn’t get a P45 or P60. Some might ask how could they be so careless but the reality is that if things are going ok, people just continue,” she said.
Ms Ní Eilí said that she knew of one case where a family had become homeless because they had no income at all.
“The parents had been living on savings and they had been getting child benefit, which was used to pay the rent. But when the regulations on getting that changed, they hit the wall and they had no services. Some local services tried to help shore things up but they couldn’t get more employment.”
She said that, in some cases, it may be unsafe for some immigrants to go back to their country of origin due to their ethnic background. She also said that in certain instances, people may have become illegal because they were working under intolerable conditions for unscrupulous employers, who held the key to their residency in this country.