Making allowances for middle earners

RADIO REVIEW:AS HE INTRODUCED a report on the possibility of the children's allowance being slashed, Pat Kenny asked the question that has become de rigueur regarding this Government's policy proposals.

“Are these drastic cuts going to happen,” the presenter wondered on Wednesday’s edition of Today With Pat Kenny (RTÉ Radio 1, weekdays), “or are we seeing just another kite being flown?” If the latter was the case, it was the equivalent of launching a kite in the middle of a particularly violent electrical storm.

As last week’s numerous radio items on the subject testified, the potential cut in child benefit is a charged issue.

Kenny was introducing a vox pop by Paddy O’Gorman with mothers collecting the allowance, in Shankill, Co Dublin. Despite hailing from different backgrounds, each of O’Gorman’s three interviewees – a separated Welsh woman in a part-time job, the wife of a young working couple strapped by negative equity and childcare, and an unemployed single mother of teenage children – made it clear they would struggle to raise their children without the money.

Kenny concluded that if these women were anything to go by, any Government moves to decrease the benefit would be “politically fraught”, although the presenter also noted that it was a small, random sample of the population.

In fact, it wasn’t random at all. O’Gorman had spoken to those who could not afford to wait for the money to be paid into their account, and hence were much more likely to be financially squeezed. As is generally the case with the roving reporter’s items, its chief value was as a glimpse into the unseen corners of Irish life, spiced up by O’Gorman’s trademark queries into his subjects’ personal lives, which at times make him sound like a frustrated matchmaker.

“Have you a man to love?” he asked Stacey, the single mother. When she replied in the negative, he pressed the matter, wondering if she missed “having the company of a man”. Stacey’s rebuff to this vaguely skin-crawling line of questioning was as emphatic as it was spirited. “Ah no, sure haven’t I Fifty Shades of Grey for that?” One wouldn’t be surprised if the Government started encouraging such racy celibacy among the wider public, given the drain children apparently pose on funds.

Feelings on the matter were running high over on The Last Word (Today FM, weekdays), as Orla O’Connor of the National Women’s Council and the entrepreneur Nicola Byrne debated the issue on Tuesday. O’Connor told the host, Matt Cooper, that in the absence of wider child-support measures, the allowance was all most parents got from the State. Byrne, by contrast, viewed the subject through the conventional prism of austerity. She claimed Ireland had the best welfare state in Europe, adding for good measure: “We are known for our welfare migrants.” We now had to “readjust downwards”, she said. As a mother of four, Byrne felt she should be means-tested for the allowance, which had become “an entitlement”.

Before one could work up a lather of liberal outrage, however, Byrne made some points that gave pause for thought. One was the widely posited notion that while means-testing went against the principle of universality, a flat cut would hurt those at the bottom more. More interestingly, Byrne noted that, as the middle-earners most affected by income-testing measures were more likely to vote, it was easier, politically, to adopt across-the-board reductions that disproportionately hit the weakest in society.

Like the best debates, the discussion highlighted the conflicting moral issues at play. It also closed with a chilling line: with the taxation of maternity benefit also being floated as a cost-saving move, Byrne felt mothers were “being softened for a slap”.

But as Sharon Corr highlighted on The Ray D’Arcy Show (Today FM, weekdays), there are parts of the world where women, and their offspring, suffer far more. Corr had recently visited Tanzania as part of an Oxfam campaign promoting women’s equality as the key to ending poverty, and returned with a clutch of harrowing tales. Many Tanzanian men habitually beat their wives and children, Corr said, and one-third of women are sexually abused when they are teenagers.

D’Arcy raised the uncomfortable question of how a wealthy white westerner went about changing this, but Corr had no first-world guilt. She tried to create awareness that such violence was wrong, she said firmly, however normal it seemed. While some of the singing star’s beliefs seemed on shaky ground – such as comparing the TV talent contest The X-Factor unfavourably with her own, supposedly more respectful, show The Voice – her sincere commitment to this cause was admirable.

In a week when the vulnerability of children was in the ether, not least because of darker events across the water, it took some chutzpah to make light of victimising the young. But the author and former Fast Show star Charlie Higson did just that, telling D’Arcy he used his youngest son as a “guinea pig” for his new book, a teen horror novel. Having read extracts at bedtime to no effect, Higson was woken at 4am one night by the boy, “in floods of tears” after a nightmare caused by the story. “And I thought, yes, I finally got him.” When D’Arcy quipped that his guest was a “sick man”, Higson jovially retorted: “My books pay for his lunch.”

Caring for children, it seems, always comes with a price.

Radio moment of the week

As Irish media gleefully noted, Ryan Tubridy’s stint on The Chris Evans Breakfast Show (BBC Radio 2, weekdays) was derided on the programme’s Facebook page this week. More ominous were hints that Tubridy lacked the full confidence of his BBC colleagues. Chatting with the traffic reporter Lynn Bowles, Tubridy noted that many people hated public speaking. “It’s a good job no one listens to us,” said Bowles. “Steady now,” came his rattled reply.