If I was on social welfare I would not have felt too happy when I woke up this morning -- unless I was a pensioner.

Despite the common perception that people on welfare "get everything", very few of us are rushing to join that group and the prospect of life on the dole is a gloomy one if you're threatened with redundancy.

People facing into Christmas on social welfare were already scrimping and saving and wondering how to make ends meet.

They certainly were not among those who could afford to set off for Newry to stock up on cheap shopping.

Indeed, the poorest people tend to live in areas with the highest prices for basic items simply because they live in places where you don't get big supermarket chains competing with each other.

For people in this situation, the prospect of their income going down rather than up is a very unpalatable one indeed. When your weekly income is less than some other people spend on a night out, there isn't a lot of room for cuts.

Many people on pensions scrimp and save also -- but others are in a reasonably good position with children reared and mortgages paid off. This group, whether scrimping or not, has managed to escape the cuts in the Budget.

If you are disabled or raising children on welfare you might look with envy -- who knows, perhaps even resentment? -- at pensioners.

Their great escape is due to the power of protest allied to the lessons of history.

When Brian Lenihan tried to remove the medical card from the better-off pensioners last year, the move sparked protests on the streets.

A generation who had cut their teeth on anti-Vietnam War protests and tax marches took on the Government with gusto. The Government backed down, lesson learned.

Also hovering over Brian Lenihan as he drew up his latest Budget was the ghost of Ernest Blythe who cut a shilling from the old age pension in 1924 and who has never been forgotten for it.

It is said that whenever officials argued for pension cuts in this Budget, Brian Lenihan simply pointed to the picture of Blythe on the wall of his office. If pensioners, some of whom are in good circumstances, can protect themselves through protest can others on welfare do the same?

Not necessarily. The vast majority of people who are unemployed simply don't want to be unemployed. In other words, they don't want to be in the group to which they now belong and their ambition is to get out of it and into work as quickly as they can. It's quite difficult to organise protests by a group whose members don't want to be there in the first place.

Pensioners are glad, by and large, to have lived long enough to be in that group and -- given the alternative -- would like to stay in it for as long as they can.

Unemployed people also carry the burden of the stigma which, wrongly, attaches to unemployment. Pensioners can march down the street knowing bystanders will applaud. Unemployed people have no such guarantee.

If we see protests this time around I suspect they will come from the ranks of people with disabilities -- as with pensioners, membership of that group is permanent and it includes people with well-honed political skills from the disability movement of the 1980s and the 1990s.

Right now, though, if you are depending on a social welfare payment, you will be feeling an extra chill in the air today -- and it isn't just caused by the weather.