Homeless mother of 5 wants social housing

[Purple]

I would be hard pressed to disagree with any of that, other than to say it will cost money (short-medium term) to get it up and running to avail of the benefits long-term.

I've no problem with hiring more teachers. I do have a problem with paying them more when there is no shortage of suitable candidates willing to take the jobs at the current pay rates.
I do think that they should all be paid the same. That can be done by making the pension levy a pay cut, thereby reducing the pensions of retired teachers. The money saved will be more than enough to equalize the pay of recent recruits.

 

[michaelm]

If we want to maintain our population some women have to have more than two kids, to balance those who have one or none, although that won't be their motivation. It would be handy if well-off women rather than poorer women had the larger families, but that tends not to happen so much.

 

[Firefly]

If we want to maintain our population some women have to have more than two kids, to balance those who have one or none, although that won't be their motivation. It would be handy if well-off women rather than poorer women had the larger families, but that tends not to happen so much.

So they should "take one for the team"?

 

[TheBigShort]

If we want to maintain our population some women have to have more than two kids, to balance those who have one or none, although that won't be their motivation. It would be handy if well-off women rather than poorer women had the larger families, but that tends not to happen so much.

I've touched on this before as it is a very important aspect of the housing issue.
I've referenced Ireland in the period after the famine where poverty was widespread but large families were abundant. Some didn't accept that the way Ireland was 100yrs ago is any way of comparing standards by today.
But if anyone wants to, all they have to do is Google the countries with the fastest growing populations and take note of how many of them are also in the poorest regions too.
The end point being, judging someone for having a baby because they are poor, and should be more responsible, is totally futile and serves no purpose other than to stigmatize people and bastardise their children. Having sex and giving birth is a natural human inclination in most human beings, regardless of their socio-economic position.

There is economic theory (Ricardo?) that identifies a correlation between wealth and decreasing family sizes and vice versa.

 

[The Horseman]

I've touched on this before as it is a very important aspect of the housing issue.
I've referenced Ireland in the period after the famine where poverty was widespread but large families were abundant. Some didn't accept that the way Ireland was 100yrs ago is any way of comparing standards by today.
But if anyone wants to, all they have to do is Google the countries with the fastest growing populations and take note of how many of them are also in the poorest regions too.
The end point being, judging someone for having a baby because they are poor, and should be more responsible, is totally futile and serves no purpose other than to stigmatize people and bastardise their children. Having sex and giving birth is a natural human inclination in most human beings, regardless of their socio-economic position.

There is economic theory (Ricardo?) that identifies a correlation between wealth and decreasing family sizes and vice versa.

We are not comparing like with like here. In the past the social welfare system inclusive of the housing aspect was completely different to the way it is now. People had to work otherwise they got no welfare payments. I remember when I left school you were not automatically entitled to any welfare payments. You had to work for at least 9 months before you could claim anything, hence the reason you went to work. And even then when your "Stamps" were used up you got nothing other than a means tested payment which if you lived at home and either of your parents were working equated to little or nothing.

You refer to how the poorest nations have big families to help support themselves. The reason this happens is specifically because there is no welfare systems in place, no pensions no sick pay etc. These people rely on their families to support them financially if they get sick or when they get old.

We have a welfare system for this. The welfare system is designed to be a safety net not a way of life. We are not judging people for having children, we are asking why they continue to have children when they don't have the means to support them.

 

[cremeegg]

Poverty is a symptom of a social problem, or basket of inter-related social problems. While all the emphasis is placed on treating the symptom the root causes will never be tackled.
My solution is education, mainly primary school level. Build more schools in the small number of areas where most social problems are concentrated, hire more teachers, lower the pupil-teacher ratio to 12 or 16, have breakfast clubs and homework clubs and teach the kids how to cook and vote and basically try to replace the parent with the school as the primary influence on the children because the root cause of all of this is bad parenting. That may not mean the parents aren't trying, it may not even be the parents of the particular child, but poverty is a result of a culture which is dislocated from, and incompatible with, mainstream society.

it will cost money (short-medium term) to get it up and running to avail of the benefits long-term.
But considering what people are like around here if they whiff an opportunity to spot taxes being 'wasted', then I would be surprised if it found much support.
But overall, you have proposed a solution that makes sense, seems doable, and shouldn't result in exacerbating the housing crisis.

I should add, it is a refreshing viewpoint from the general bile typically regurgitated about taxes.

But reducing class sizes would not be a waste of taxes. The primary school system is in reasonably good shape in Ireland, (unlike the secondary school system).

There would be no shortage of public support for increased public spending if it was to be spent on improving society. At present there is a justified suspicion that increased public spending just masks bad practice in the public sector.

Money for more teachers, no problem, more money for the existing teachers, I'm not so sure.

 

[Purple]

BS, the Horseman summed it up very well.

 

[Purple]

But reducing class sizes would not be a waste of taxes.

It is in most areas. The most expensive thing you can do in education is reduce the pupil-teacher ratio. It required more teachers and more classrooms and so more schools. Reducing the class below 28 has negligible results on outcomes. Reducing it below 16 generally has negative outcomes. There's an excellent section on this in Malcolm Gladwell's book David and Goliath.

 

[Purple]

This is the best post I have read on AAM in a very long time.

Thanks.

 

[Early Riser]

While all the emphasis is placed on treating the symptom the root causes will never be tackled.
My solution is education, mainly primary school level. Build more schools in the small number of areas where most social problems are concentrated, hire more teachers, lower the pupil-teacher ratio to 12 or 16, have breakfast clubs and homework clubs and teach the kids how to cook and vote and basically try to replace the parent with the school as the primary influence on the children because the root cause of all of this is bad parenting. That may not mean the parents aren't trying, it may not even be the parents of the particular child, but poverty is a result of a culture which is dislocated from, and incompatible with, mainstream society

Excellent suggestion there, Purple.

The only thing, I'd add is that primary school level is probably too late, at least for some. There is also a need for high quality pre-school education, concentrated in areas of most need, and with home-school liaison work. Unfortunately, everyone will call for a piece of such a pie, and we would end up with glorified creches, unless very tightly ring-fenced.

 

[Purple]

Excellent suggestion there, Purple.

The only thing, I'd add is that primary school level is probably too late, at least for some. There is also a need for high quality pre-school education, concentrated in areas of most need, and with home-school liaison work. Unfortunately, everyone will call for a piece of such a pie, and we would end up with glorified creches, unless very tightly ring-fenced.

I agree we need to get them before they are 7. There is no way that private sector creches should get in on the act though. Start and junior infants.

 

[TheBigShort]

the Horseman summed it up very well.

I'm sorry I disagree entirely with his summation.

You refer to how the poorest nations have big families to help support themselves. The reason this happens is specifically because there is no welfare systems in place, no pensions no sick pay etc. These people rely on their families to support them financially if they get sick or when they get old.

Would you propose we revert to this type of society?
As well as no welfare, they have higher infant mortality, lower life expectancy, poorer disease control - a neighbor brought their kid for pre-school vaccination, no cost. Another form of welfare that is a benefit to us all in the prevention of disease.

We have a welfare system for this. The welfare system is designed to be a safety net not a way of life. We are not judging people for having children, we are asking why they continue to have children when they don't have the means to support them.

If there are people engaging in the welfare system as a 'way of life', that is first and foremost a sad way to be in my opinion. If they are people, capable of going to work that is even sadder. If they are people capable of going to work, and employers are actually wishing to hire them, then that is the worst of all.
But I would suggest that these people are a tiny cohort of individuals and of such insignificance to the overall welfare bill that any cuts (or whatever is proposed) will be so small as to be not worth deliberating over.
On the other hand, there are people, through no fault of their own, that have grown up in environments that are, putting it mildly, deprived. Be it drugs, alcohol, illiteracy, neglect,criminality, mental or physical abuse, no education etc that are simply not capable of holding down a steady job at best, or are simply not offered employment in the first place. I am always somewhat bemused at the 'go out and get a job' mentality, when in reality, employers wont hire any of these people in any case!
Anyone remember the character Ratz! from Paths to Freedom? I wouldn't trust him to be a lollipop man.
So it is simply not good enough to judge someone as 'lifestyle' welfare recipients and then introduce blunt policy instruments that will adversely affect thousands of others who are genuinely on the wrong side of a bit of luck. Yes there are people playing the system but they are very much the thin end of the wedge.

 

[Purple]

Would you propose we revert to this type of society?
As well as no welfare, they have higher infant mortality, lower life expectancy, poorer disease control - a neighbor brought their kid for pre-school vaccination, no cost. Another form of welfare that is a benefit to us all in the prevention of disease.

No, of course not. Nobody is. It is simply being pointed out that such a country/society requires high birth rates and ours does not.

 

[Purple]

If there are people engaging in the welfare system as a 'way of life', that is first and foremost a sad way to be in my opinion. If they are people, capable of going to work that is even sadder. If they are people capable of going to work, and employers are actually wishing to hire them, then that is the worst of all.
But I would suggest that these people are a tiny cohort of individuals and of such insignificance to the overall welfare bill that any cuts (or whatever is proposed) will be so small as to be not worth deliberating over.
On the other hand, there are people, through no fault of their own, that have grown up in environments that are, putting it mildly, deprived. Be it drugs, alcohol, illiteracy, neglect,criminality, mental or physical abuse, no education etc that are simply not capable of holding down a steady job at best, or are simply not offered employment in the first place. I am always somewhat bemused at the 'go out and get a job' mentality, when in reality, employers wont hire any of these people in any case!
Anyone remember the character Ratz! from Paths to Freedom? I wouldn't trust him to be a lollipop man.
So it is simply not good enough to judge someone as 'lifestyle' welfare recipients and then introduce blunt policy instruments that will adversely affect thousands of others who are genuinely on the wrong side of a bit of luck. Yes there are people playing the system but they are very much the thin end of the wedge.

Yes, but our current welfare system maintains and encourages such people and such a sub-culture. It will take generations to fix but high welfare rates sustains and so encourage such a scenario. I don't particularly want to see less spending on this problem. I want to see the money spent differently. Our current system fails these people; it sustains a type of just tolerable despair which leaves people in a chronic state of underachievement and dissatisfaction which in turn leads to higher rates of substance abuse and hopelessness. There is a reason that suicide rates are so high among young men from economically deprived (really socially deprived) areas and money isn't it.

 

[TheBigShort]

If she presents herself as homeless she would be accommodated either in a hotel room or one of the hubs. While not ideal initially it would provide a bed for her family.

No she wouldn't! That is the whole point! She has been placed on the Emergency Housing List! She has not been given emergency housing! She has not been given a hotel room or a hostel! I can't think why? Would it have something to do with hotels and hostels being particularly inadequate places to house a child needing full-time medical care? Would it be to do with hotels and hostels being reluctant, understandably, to take on the responsibility of housing a child that needs full-time medical care?

Yes there probably are other factors that have led her to this situation some she had no influence on and some she had influence on. You refer to the child that has Cerebal Palsy on your replies but you never seem to reference the fact that she had another child while homeless.

Maybe she was serially raped by an uncle when she was 14? Perhaps she committed self-harm, turned to drugs for a period, attempted suicide. Perhaps she thought about an abortion but her religious faith prevented it?
Or perhaps, she is simply gaming the system. Milking it for all its worth - 5 kids in a two bed house with 10 others and a sick child.
As BB would say, it's like she won the National Lottery!

Either way, or some other way, we don't know. If we don't know, should we judge her on her 'behavior'? Can we conclusively say she was 'irresponsible'?
If not, and I don't think we can, then deal with the facts as we know them to be.

A woman with 5 kids in a two bed house, one seriously disabled, sharing with at least six others.

Being from a deprived social economic background does not hinder people from college.

Yes it can. Very much so.

 

[rob oyle]

If we want to maintain our population some women have to have more than two kids, to balance those who have one or none, although that won't be their motivation. It would be handy if well-off women rather than poorer women had the larger families, but that tends not to happen so much.

That is incorrect, but it gets stated ad nauseam without consideration of the evidence.

Ireland has one of the highest fertility rates in the developed world, in or around 2 over the last 30 years. The fertility rate in Ireland halved between the 1960s (from 4.0) and the 1990s, bottoming out at just under 2.0 before increasing slightly again in subsequent years. A fertility rate of 2 is repeatedly considered to be the ‘replacement rate’ i.e. the rate at which one generation is replaced by the next, the theory being that the two children replace their two parents ultimately. However, the limitation of this theory is that it does not reflect the fact that we are living in multi-generational societies. This means that the idea of a required replacement rate is not borne out in the real world. The average annual natural increase in the 1950s was 27,000, was just under 20,000 in the 1990s and over the last two census periods (2006 to 2016) was 42,000 per annum. That's just shy of 120 extra people to provide for every single day, before accounting for migration. Those population figures all come from the CSO's own records.

 

[Early Riser]

That is incorrect, but it gets stated ad nauseam without consideration of the evidence.

At risk of veering off-topic, have you any links for this evidence. On the face of it, longer life-expectancy would seem to only give a time limited boost to population, without adequate replacement rate. Also, it doesn't address the issue of replacing working age population as opposed to total population (leaving immigration aside).

Anyway, both the OECD and the UN seem to support the 2.1 figure :


http://www.un.org/esa/sustdev/natli..._sheets/demographics/total_fertility_rate.pdf

https://www.oecd.org/els/family/SF_2_1_Fertility_rates.pdf

Also further info here:

https://www.thoughtco.com/total-fertility-rate-1435463

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate

 

[rob oyle]

Hi ER, the figures come from here: [broken link removed] Population Estimates&Planguage=0
It's table PEA15, then select Natural Increase (note the title is 'increase', not 'change') and then export to excel. Ireland's native population, before migration, has increased every year on record. It went up 26.6k in 1951, 33.3k in '71, 22k in '91 and a whopping 47.5k in 2011. We're now adding the equivalent of a Drogheda each and every year and yet we're worried about low fertility rates.

 

[Early Riser]

Thanks, Rob. i didn't get to those tables yet. But just to note that in the 66 years from1950 -1966 our fertility rate fell below 2.1 for 26 years while 40 were above. And we have never fallen as dramatically as some other European neighbours. Of course, those lower birth rate years have been concentrated over the past 25 years.

Over the same 66 year period our death rate has fallen from 12.7 to 6.2 per thousand. This is producing an increasing aging population - and as (I believe) life expectancy can't keep increasing as it has done, the death rate is likely to increase again in future years. Even if it didn't it would mean an increasing number of dependent or medically needy people - unless we replace the youth adequately through birth or immigration (or both, as immigrants tend to have high birth rates - being at the right age, I suppose).

I understand that there is a recognized phenomenon of development where falling death rates outpace falling birth rates, producing a temporary natural population increase. But when the population cohort/bulge that failed to replace itself begins to die off there is a rapid population decrease (without immigration). Presumably this is where Japan now finds itself.

 

[The Horseman]

No she wouldn't! That is the whole point! She has been placed on the Emergency Housing List! She has not been given emergency housing! She has not been given a hotel room or a hostel! I can't think why? Would it have something to do with hotels and hostels being particularly inadequate places to house a child needing full-time medical care? Would it be to do with hotels and hostels being reluctant, understandably, to take on the responsibility of housing a child that needs full-time medical care?



Maybe she was serially raped by an uncle when she was 14? Perhaps she committed self-harm, turned to drugs for a period, attempted suicide. Perhaps she thought about an abortion but her religious faith prevented it?
Or perhaps, she is simply gaming the system. Milking it for all its worth - 5 kids in a two bed house with 10 others and a sick child.
As BB would say, it's like she won the National Lottery!

Either way, or some other way, we don't know. If we don't know, should we judge her on her 'behavior'? Can we conclusively say she was 'irresponsible'?
If not, and I don't think we can, then deal with the facts as we know them to be.

A woman with 5 kids in a two bed house, one seriously disabled, sharing with at least six others.



Yes it can. Very much so.

The hubs have wrap around services so they are resourced to meet the needs of those living there. You make mention on one child needing full time medical care, how will where they live affect this, are you suggesting living in a house under cramped conditions is somehow more medically appropriate to a family hub?

I am a bit surprised at the second paragraph. The question we asked was why an additional child was conceived while homeless? We don't know about the life this person had growing up but to suggest she had no influence on her current situation is wrong. She may have had difficult circumstances to get through we all have that's life. But the question that has been asked by myself and others on this forum is why she and her partner increased the size of their family while homeless?

In respect of your third paragraph I note that you have only taken a snippet from my initial comment to prove your point rather than using the whole of my initial comment. Education has never been more available to all than at any time in the past. The Govt are continually offering course's to help people become more employable in expanding sectors of the economy. The majority (if not all) colleges offer courses both online and classroom based so if you have a broadband connection and a tablet you can access these courses.