That story about a group of Poles allegedly flying into Ireland every month to collect welfare is yet another reminder of how dramatically the country has changed in 20 years. It struck a particular chord with me because, once upon a time, I might have had a role in the fraud investigation.
Back in the mid-1980s, I worked for a while in the Department of Social Welfare, in a section called UA/UB Decisions. The UA/UB bit stood for Unemployment Assistance and Unemployment Benefit - disputes about these were referred to us by the employment exchanges. But what little glamour the job had derived from the abbreviation by which the section was popularly known. We always used this when answering the phone, picking up the receiver and announcing, simply: "Decisions". Not even the Taoiseach gets to say that.
The 1980s was a boom period for social welfare, with record growth on all schemes. If you had written a book then predicting the emergence of a wealthy Ireland that would be a magnet for migrants, some of whom would fly here from Poland to collect welfare (allegedly), taking advantage of an Irish-inspired revolution in low-cost air travel, bookshops would have filed your work under "science fiction". Also, it would have been assumed you were on drugs.
Fraud was not my brief, most of the time. My speciality was family problems, typically involving male welfare recipients who drank or gambled all the money. As well as being before Ryanair and the fall of Communism, this was the tail-end of the era when a man automatically received all the dependants' allowances, even if his wife was claiming too.
So distraught women often complained to the employment exchanges, and the exchanges would ring Dublin, where a confident-sounding young man would answer the phone saying: "Decisions". Solomon-like, the man would then ask the exchange to secure independent corroboration of the family circumstances - following which, a discreet arrangement would be made to redistribute the money.
That was the sort of thing I did, mostly. But there was an occasion once when I was briefly assigned to fraud; and for a while, investigations by welfare officers would land on my desk. They were mostly routine cases, where guilt had been admitted and the offenders were already repaying the money at 50p a week, with a promise to increase this if they got a job. The only individual case I remember ever dealing with involved a Traveller family.
I mention they were Travellers only because the lack of a fixed address - and a multiplicity of non-fixed ones - was central to their alleged activities. These included a cross-border element, involving the only border that welfare recipients could afford to cross back then. And the case stands out in my memory because it caused all decisiveness to desert me.
Their file was at least two inches thick. It covered three or possibly four generations of the family, led by a genius who, according to the investigator, had committed "every possible permutation" of UA/UB fraud, including claims for fictional children. The investigation appeared to be a masterpiece too. The trouble was I didn't know where to start with it.
Partly this was because of the investigator's handwriting (the file was entirely handwritten), which was all but illegible. The officer concerned was in every other way a model professional. He was so fastidious in his work, it was joked that the appearance of his car anywhere near a building site resulted in men scampering down ladders and fleeing across fields.
But his writing was atrocious. It wasn't untidy, like a doctor's. On the contrary, it was as neat as everything else he did. It's just that his 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. But I was as helpless as the early Egyptologists before they found the Rosetta Stone.
He bought a typewriter later, or was given one. And even in this case, he had succeeded in his main goal: ending the scam. Once rumbled, the family had fled the jurisdiction. A successful prosecution or recovery of money now was unlikely.
I can't even remember what was required of me in the case: a rubber stamp of some kind, probably. But whatever it was, I failed to supply it during my short stint in fraud. The file just sat there on the desk, rebuking me every time I picked up the phone and said: "Decisions". Just as I had inherited it from my predecessor, I bequeathed it in due course.
I enjoyed my time in social welfare. The period coincided with a push to get us to wear name-tags, so that we would not be the "faceless civil servants" of popular scorn. I remembered that when, a few months after I left, a former colleague - like me a "deciding officer" - was dragged from his house one night and shot in both legs.
He was the unfortunate person to whom the task of ending the dole payments of one Martin Cahill devolved, after it emerged that Cahill was Ireland's leading criminal. I read of the shooting in Australia, where I was on the first year of a career break. And amid the sympathy I felt for a colleague - who has recovered and flourished since, happily - I couldn't help the thought that getting out of social welfare when I did had been one of my better decisions.