Thread by @ciarantierney

Both @LeoVaradkar and @PatKennyNT were on #Newstalk today complaining about lazy people on €350 a week who don't want to go back to work.

Isn't it amazing people on €200,000-plus a year can convince us the poor, low paid, and most vulnerable should be the focus of our ire?

And what does it say about the "booming" economy we are supposed to have had, if thousands of people would rather the emergency #Covid_19 payment than returning to precarious, insecure, low paid jobs?

#IrelandLockdown

I know very many people here in #Galway in tourism-related businesses, with big mortgages, who are sick with worry that their jobs won't be there when the #coronavirus pandemic ends.

They find such comments insulting and hurtful, and they hate being unemployed all of a sudden.

People working as tour guides, in the hotel and transport industries, or teaching English to foreigners, are so afraid they won't have jobs for years to come and yet some of them are being portrayed as "spongers" on national radio.

This kind of "punching down" against people who were struggling to pay rents and mortgages even before the pandemic is appalling and makes such a mockery of "We're all in this together" slogan.

None of them wanted their businesses to close down at literally 24 hours notice in mid-March, but they accepted the closures out of concern for public health.

To smear them now as "spongers" or "lazy" gives our tiny elite convenient scapegoats, to deflect attention away ...

... from lack of concern for front-line health workers in the early stages of the pandemic, insufficient testing, and the scandal of what went on in our nursing homes.

But, oh no, forget about that and concentrate on the "spongers" living it up on €350 per week in this crisis.

Let's forget that three of our Government Ministers were rejected by the voters in February or that our Minister for Health was facing a vote of no confidence, after opposing a strike by nurses in search of decent pay and conditions only a year ago.

Forget about that, or the patients on trolleys in our hospitals, because the young one down the road, who was earning the minimum wage in a part-time job, is living the highlife at taxpayers' expense on her €350 per week.

Do they take us for fools?