Online dole forms
By Primal Sneeze ~ February 7th, 2009. Filed under: Civil servants, Internet, Politicians.
“Application forms for Jobseekers Benefit and Jobseekers Allowance are available for the first time to download from the Department of Social and Family Affairs website” reads the press release from Minister Mary Hanafin*.
Apparently this “was part of a series of service improvement measures being brought in to help speed up the process”.
Note the download bit. Yes, download. Not an online form. A couple of dirty big PDF files to download, print, complete by hand and take to the local dole office. I’m being harsh – to make it really user-friendly, it is possible to tick some boxes before printing. No typing in text though – can’t have it too user-friendly.
Note the first time bit. Eh, why? What was so difficult about uploading a PDF file and adding a link that it took so long? How does it warrant a press release? Why am I even blogging about it?
This is 2009. When people want information they go to the relevant website. They expect to find everything they need there. Anything less than everything is unacceptable.
On the Department of Social and Family Affairs website there is an invitation to the public to vote for it in Accessible Ireland’s eGovernment Awards.
This, believe it or not, is the departmental website than only published a list of its email addresses in the last few weeks. Accessible?
*I am tempted to recommend ministers experience what it is like from the public’s perspective before taking up their portfolios. The minister for health should get sick; the minister for transport should take the bus. In Ms Hanafin’s case she should be sacked for a few months. Call it off-the-job training. However, even as a school teacher of many years she still managed to make a cat’s arse of the education system in her previous role – such training would be pointless.
Ah yes, but look at the competition!
What do we need eGovernment awards for? I thought we had elections (to fail to) chose them.
Looks like we could have one of those elections very soon.
btw: Look what you’ve done! The amount of traffic from daltai.com is incredible.
Stupid cunts. Jobless fecks don’t have enough money for printer ink!
I can’t bring myself to use the C word in posts, so thanks for doing it for me.
@Primal Sneeze – Bhal, má insíonn tusa scéal maith…caithfear é roinnt! It was apropos of somebody daring to answer a question (aprtly) in English about Irish (partly) in Irish. I felt that yarn passte wie die Faust aufs Auge as the Germans would say.
After logging onto this website,thinking it was where my boyfriend could sign on online,due to it being a link from google(common mistake)i realized it was a forum telling me that the online signing for the dole is a joke. The reason why he is signing online(or trying to)is because he has had it with trying to contact,be contacted and the uncontactable local dole office…after nealy two and a half months of having to send in his mothers p60,her bank statements,the mortgage repayments,her payslips and even down to HER birthcert(by the way he is living at home due to the fact he is unemployed)the dole office cancelled his payment(well i say poayemnt but it STILL hadnt come through yet,even after all that)…without written notification and without much thought due to the fact that he didnt sign on again…as you are supposed to every month…but he had recieved no letter or anything else to say that he should. And as far as they are concerned, he is supossed to be paying €75 a week in rent to his mum…so technically he is in debt as they were not concerned about his finances but more interested in his mothers. I would just like to say that i signed on the exact same time as him and got mine sorted two weeks later without having to tell the dole office all the ins and outs of my mothers financial business. I am in the exact same situation as him. All i can say is that at least if his mother ever wants to sign on they have every last single bit of information concerning her finances. And the person who wanted to sign on in the first place is still an unknown to them. Just somebody they could press delete on their fancy probably ’state-of-the-art’ computers. Majorly pissed off.
I got a feeling they’d make his mum go through the whole thing again. As much as they’d like us believe it, they don’t actually have state-of-the-art computers.