Decisions! Decisions!
For much of my early 20s, I worked in a section of the Department of Social Welfare (DSW) that went by the ungainly title Unemployment Assistance/ Unemployment Benefit Decisions. This was usually shortened in correspondence to UA/ UB Decisions. But that wasn’t very sexy either.
So for several years in the mid-80s, whenever my work phone rang, I always picked up the receiver and said: “Decisions!”
This was a good, if cruel, joke. Then, as now, I was a natural procrastinator who rarely did anything important today if it could be put off till tomorrow. I need deadlines, preferably urgent, to function, which may be why I ended up in journalism. But in the DSW back then, there was rarely any urgency. Even in a section called Decisions, most things could be put off till tomorrow, or next week.
RM Block
It felt good saying the word, I’ll admit. Not even the taoiseach gets to bark “Decisions!” when answering the phone. If he did, people would think he had notions.
Any implication of power, however, was also illusory. As statutorily appointed Deciding Officers, ruling on problem cases referred to us by the employment exchanges or social welfare investigators, my colleagues and I were unglorified wielders of rubber stamps.
Some enjoyed the wielding more than others. I had a workmate of slightly Thatcherite bent – one of the few men in the office invariably dressed in collar and tie – who affected to suspect that, even at a time of record unemployment, everyone on the dole was fundamentally work-shy.
Whenever you referred a file to him, he had the habit of unsheathing his “disallowed” stamp – pre-emptively inking it and placing it beside the file – in a manner suggestive of a cowboy loosening his holster flap.
But I think that was just his little joke. Our work was bound by rules, after all, and in a department dealing mainly with the poor and vulnerable, most people erred on the side of socialism.
When disallowing a dole applicant for being “not available” or “not genuinely seeking” work, usually, we were just acting on a recommendation from the exchanges or an investigating officer. Besides, our decisions could always be appealed.
For most of the time I spent in the DSW, my speciality was family law. That also sounds grander than it was. Although, to be fair, this was an area where the consequences of a decision could be very important to those on the receiving end. It was also one where I may have done some good.
The typical case referred to me involved a male, married welfare recipient who was drinking or gambling all his money. This was the end of the era when men with families automatically received all the dependants’ allowances, even if their wives or partners were on welfare too.
The desperate spouses of such men often pleaded their situation to the exchanges, which would ring Dublin, where a young bureaucrat would answer the phone saying: “Decisions!” Solomon-like, he would then ask the exchange to secure independent corroboration of the family circumstances from a respected third party (RTP).
The holy trinity of RTPs was a parish priest, Garda sergeant or solicitor. Provided one of those, or someone else of unimpeachable authority, could confirm the family situation in writing, the man in Dublin would advise giving half the welfare recipient’s money directly to the wife.
Those cases were easy and could always be dealt with instantly, justifying the billing with which I answered the phone. Then, by contrast, there were the likes of the Murphy file (not its real name), which I could wrestle with for days or weeks without conclusion.
The Murphy file landed on my desk during a period when, briefly, I was assigned to fraud.
Most fraud cases were routine. By the time the file reached us, guilt would have been admitted and the offenders already repaying the money in pittances – 50 pence a week was not unusual – with a promise to increase this if they got a job. There was usually no need to prosecute.
But the Murphy file was extraordinarily complex, involving as it did a Traveller family. I mention they were Travellers only because their lack of a fixed address – and a multiplicity of non-fixed ones – was central to their alleged activities. Those were multifarious and further complicated by a cross-Border element, with simultaneous claims on either side. And the case stands out in my memory because it caused all decisiveness to desert me.
The file was two inches thick. It covered three or possibly four generations of a family, led by an ingenious patriarch who, according to the investigator, had committed “every possible permutation” of UA/ UB fraud, including claims for fictional children (à la Myles Na gCopaleen’s satire of Gaeltacht life, The Poor Mouth, although at least the fictional children in this case were human).
The investigation appeared to be a masterpiece too. The trouble was, I couldn’t read it. This was because of the investigator’s handwriting. The officer concerned was in every other way a model professional. He was so zealous in his work, it was joked that the appearance of his car in the vicinity of a building site resulted in (officially unemployed) men scampering down ladders and fleeing across fields.
And it’s not that his handwriting was untidy, like the proverbial doctor’s. On the contrary, it was as neat as everything else he did. It’s just that his unique calligraphic style did not involve closing any loops, so that his a’s and o’s looked like u’s; his q’s looked like y’s; and his p’s looked like upside-down h’s. I spent long periods staring at it, trying to crack the code, but as helpless as the early Egyptologists before they found the Rosetta Stone.
The officer acquired a typewriter eventually – or was given one, as a hint. Alas, this was too late to help with the Murphy file. It must be said that, even in this case, he had succeeded in ending the fraud. Once rumbled, the family had fled to England. A successful prosecution or meaningful recovery of money was unlikely.
And I can’t even remember what was required of me in the case: another rubber stamp of some kind, no doubt, or several stamps. Whatever it was, I failed to supply it during my stint in fraud. The file just sat there on the desk, mocking me every time I said: “Decisions”. Just as I had inherited it from my predecessor, I later bequeathed it to someone else.
Ours was not a public office. There was no front counter people could come to, in complaint or inquiry. But occasionally someone would read the small print and present themselves at security, asking to see the person who had ruled on their case.
Once, a nervous female colleague asked if I would go downstairs and talk to an angry man whose payments she had reduced or disqualified. I did and he was very reasonable to deal with, seemingly happy that someone had stepped out of the machine to talk to him.
This was a period when there was talk of making all civil servants wear name tags, so that we would not be the stereotypes of old. But there were principled objections to this, at least in DSW. Being identifiable to someone whose payments you disqualified could be dangerous, as a colleague was to discover the hard way soon afterwards.
I enjoyed my time in social welfare, up to a point. We were on the frontline of a national crisis then and had a sense of camaraderie in the trenches. There were a lot of good people in the department. Smart ones too.
A young lad called Martin Fraser joined us during the time I was there, straight from school, in his teens. When I met him again, decades later, he was head of the Department of the Taoiseach and about to become Irish ambassador to the UK.
But I never wanted a career in the Civil Service and found the job increasingly oppressive. So by the autumn of 1988, I had procrastinated long enough. That October, having put the moment off for five-and-a-half years, I said “Decisions!” into the phone one last time.
Mind you, even this was a fudge. I had only applied for an unpaid career break of 12 months, which could be extended annually for up to five years. My plan was to spend a year working around Australia and wean myself off the permanent and pensionable life. Failing that, I would crawl back and say, well, at least I tried.
Six months later, I was doing night shifts in a zinc smelter in Melbourne when I read the news about a former colleague, a fellow Deciding Officer named Brian Purcell, who had been dragged from his north Dublin home one night and shot in both legs.
It was the brutal culmination of a series of events that began back in February 1988, when RTÉ’s Today Tonight programme revealed that one of Ireland’s most notorious criminals, Martin Cahill – aka the General – was claiming unemployment assistance every week from Dublin’s Werburgh Street exchange.
Confronted by RTÉ reporter Brendan O’Brien, Cahill covered his face with a hand while pretending innocence of any crime career. Henceforth, in a classic journalistic euphemism, he became “the man who denies he is the General”.
But in the Dáil the next day, there was consternation at the news that Cahill was on the dole and that, while the owner of a house in Rathmines, he had also been allocated social housing.
Progressive Democrats leader Des O’Malley suggested he must need the two homes for his “art collection” (Cahill had masterminded the Russborough House robbery, in which paintings worth £30 million (€34 million) disappeared).
[ Brian Purcell profile: Civil servant once shot by Martin CahillOpens in new window ]
An embarrassed minister for Social Welfare, Michael Woods, assured the house that Cahill’s dole had been suspended. But as some of us knew, that was beyond the power of even a minister: it required rubber stamping by a statutorily appointed Deciding Officer. Purcell was the unfortunate officer to whom the task devolved.
Later and even more unluckily, he had to attend the appeal and sit across the table from the man who still denied he was the General.
For much of the Irish public, Cahill’s dealings with the law were a bit of a joke. He played it up himself, turning up for one court appearance in a wig and dark glasses, then stripping down to a Mickey Mouse T-shirt and boxer shorts for the TV cameras.
But he was no joke for my colleague. After the dole disqualification was upheld, Purcell received a visit at his home one night from a group of masked men. They tied his pregnant wife up, then bundled him into the back of his own car and drove across the city to Sandymount, near the DART railway line. There, after a long and terrifying wait, they shot him in both thighs.
He made a complete recovery somehow and went on to enjoy a high-profile career, rising to be secretary general in the Department of Justice. But reading about what had happened to him from the safe distance of Australia, I was reminded what a mad and dangerous country 1980s Ireland was. Getting out of it for a while seemed like one of my better decisions.
This is an extract from Not Making Hay – The Life and Deadlines of a ‘Diary’ Farmer by Frank McNally, which is published by Gill
