On the State’s Trimmed-Down Welfare Payments, the Poor Get Poorer : Country poverty: A young woman with a baby can no longer make ends meet. She asks the governor: ‘Why cut where it already hurts?’

Darlene Irish is 26, unemployed and unmarried, with an 11-month-old daughter.

She depends on the state to live, and most of that state aid still is making its way to her, despite big cuts in Michigan’s welfare programs.

But even the $66 a month the state has taken away is a hefty chunk for a woman who is living on the edge.

“When you get cut, you don’t have the money for shoes, for clothes,” Irish said. “You take out money for the diapers. You take out money for gas to get into town. . . .”

In a week, the money is gone.

Irish is not one of the 82,614 Michigan adults whose $200-a-month General Assistance benefits were cut off Oct. 1 by order of Republican Gov. John Engler. Instead, she is one of the 676,263 covered by the state family aid program. They have lost emergency needs money, adult dental care, about 2% of their general checks and all of their allowances for winter heat.

Irish has a high school diploma but little training. She can’t afford child care for Dixie Lynn. The baby’s father is in prison.

She doesn’t show hopelessness. Nor does she show resolve to get a better life. She just talks about surviving.

“I could go out and get a job, but you don’t get the satisfaction of a decent wage,” she said. If she does work, she said, she will lose so much welfare she will be unable to afford to live.

With her baby girl to mind, she can’t even scrape together the extra cash she used to get by scavenging ditches and Lake Michigan beach for dime-deposit returnable bottles.

Irish lives in Empire, a Lake Michigan bed-and-breakfast town filled in summer with tourists. Her rented house trailer is so small that beds barely fit in the bedrooms. It is almost possible to touch the front and back walls in the same reach. The living room furniture consists of two chairs held together by tape.

Dixie Lynn giggles and plays inside a hand-me-down pen, passed along by neighbors. The mesh netting on the sides is mended with bits of string and wire ties from bread bags.

Irish gets $195 a month in food stamps and a Medicaid card. The state’s Women, Infants and Children program provides cereal, formula and juice for her daughter. But Michigan’s Aid to Families with Dependent Children now sends her $374 a month--instead of $440--to cover rent and utilities, put fuel in the furnace and gas in the car, buy clothes and shoes and anything else the family needs.

“You’ve practically got to spend one week and not the next,” Irish said slowly, softly. “I get by. Sometimes the refrigerator is bare, but I get by.”

The budget cut has eroded the cushion between her and the edge, she said.

And Darlene Irish has been on that edge all of her life--fetching pop cans for dimes, carrying in the landlord’s firewood and washing dishes for rent money, sometimes packing cherries at the Empire cannery.

“It’s so hard to keep your head above water, on or off welfare,” she said.

She can’t understand the rationale of the governor’s cuts:

“Why cut where it already hurts? I don’t know if he’s aware of what he’s doing. If he could live in poor people’s shoes, he would realize how hard it is to get by.”

Irish had her chance earlier this month. She sought out the governor at a local market during his three-county swing through northern Michigan.

With Dixie Lynn on her hip, she told him about the cuts, about having no money for baby shoes. A Traverse City newspaper reporter recorded the exchange.

“I know. It’s tough,” Engler said.

“It’s more than tough,” Irish answered.