Ms Karen Kiernan:

One Family is delighted to be here in order to raise the important issues relating to lone parents in the context of social protection. We are Ireland's organisation for people parenting alone, sharing parenting or separating. We have been in existence since 1972, when we were established as Cherish, and we provide a range of parenting and family supports in Dublin and throughout Ireland to one-parent families. We also do policy work and have a membership system. We do a lot of practice-to-policy work. What we are saying is based on evidence from parents and families with whom we work. Children are really at the heart of what we do, and the question how to support parents to be the best possible parents they can in difficult circumstances for their children is the prism through which we see everything.

The families with which we work and which we represent come from all kinds of socioeconomic and educational backgrounds. There is no stereotype or particular type of person who may find himself or herself in the position of parenting alone. People arrive in the position from a very wide range of circumstances, but a very typical lone parent is a female in her 30s with one child. She is probably sharing parenting with the father, although there is no specific research to support this. She is probably in low-paid part-time employment, which is part of the difficulties we will consider today, and living in poverty.

Longitudinal research in Ireland and other countries has shown that children do just as well in one-parent families as in two-parent families and that the real issues are poverty and the difficulties in accessing the right services and education. If one controls for these factors, children do just as well in both family types, so many of the negative stereotypes to which parents can be subjected are unfounded and unfair.

One in four families with children in Ireland today is a one-parent family, and one in five children lives in a one-parent family. This is, therefore, a common type of family; it is no longer an aberration. We know from looking across Europe and from studies there that we can expect families to continue to diversify. We see more people separating and divorcing, albeit at very low rates in comparison to our neighbours. They are still growing and diversifying. We see more people in step-parent families and blended families. Part of what we want to highlight is that our services, policies and laws need to be able to cope with such diversity and not just see things in a very rigid and more traditional way which focuses on the "male-breadwinner, married, mammy-daddy" family.

Families are much more interesting, diverse and challenging in those ways as well. The context of our submission is the reform and cuts introduced in budget 2012, which impacted hugely on lone parents, as was well rehearsed in the Houses of the Oireachtas and in wider society. These reforms and cuts were unprecedented. I believe the intent of this reform never came to pass but led instead to many parents having to leave work or being faced with higher levels of poverty. The statistics show that as a result of these cuts and reforms, there are more children living in poverty. For example, there was an immediate 40% reduction in the payments to lone parents who were in work and in receipt of the family income supplement, FIS. At that time, as there were not many jobs available, there was no cross-departmental planning in this area and child care and after-school care were not considered. We believed from the outset that this reform would fail and believe it has failed although studies, research and impact assessments in this regard have yet to be done, from which we will learn more in due course.

Lone parents want to work. Many are working but many are challenged because of the lack of access to suitable child care, education and training and in-work assistance, as well as family-friendly employment. Some of the points we propose to speak to today will hit on issues such as how to make work pay, child poverty, in-work supports and improving access to education for lone parents. I am sure it is well known that poverty rates are always highest among lone parents. According to the most recent data, those living in lone-parent households continue to experience the highest rates of deprivation, with almost 60% of individuals from such households experiencing one or more forms of deprivation. This compares with 29% of the general population who experience deprivation. As such, an individual living in a one-parent family is twice as likely to live in deprivation. Children living in one-parent family households are almost twice as likely to live in poverty as other children and 23% of children in a one-parent family experience deprivation. This is not a situation any of us would like to see continue. We welcome the commitment in Better Outcomes, Brighter Futures - the national children and young people's strategy - to lift 97,000 children out of poverty. However, since publication of that strategy the target has been raised because more children have moved into poverty. We believe that the focus of these measures must be on children living in one-parent families because they are consistently the poorest, twice as likely to live in poverty and the most socially excluded in Ireland. We note the Minister for Social Protection, Deputy Varadkar, and the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, Deputy Zappone, have publicly committed to reaching the target on child poverty and we welcome those commitments.

I am a member of the advisory council for Better Outcomes, Brighter Futures. A subgroup of that council has worked in partnership with the Department of Social Protection specifically on child poverty and trying to develop targets and measures to implement a plan on the reduction of child poverty. That group was co-convened by the Children's Rights Alliance and the Department of Social Protection and it has been a useful constructive process, although we have a long way to go. We now have an NGO report with a set of recommendations for all Departments. This is not just an issue for the Department of Social Protection because, as we know, poverty is interconnected across the Departments. We have set out what we believe the Government should be doing. The Department of Social Protection is collating inputs from other Departments and it will produce its own report on what the Government should be doing. We believe that targeted income supports remain the most effective measure to reduce child poverty in specific families. Rather than increasing universal payments, we need to target income supports.

On child maintenance, in one-parent families there is frequently another parent who may or may not be taking financial or other types of responsibility for his or her child or children. This is an extremely complex area. The way in which maintenance interacts with social welfare payments can cause hardship for children and parents. We have had discussions on this issue with officials from the District Court and the Department of Social Protection and we are hopeful that we will be able to improve some of the processes in place in that regard.

However, if one looks at the big picture, other countries take responsibility to ensure that children are not poor. They guarantee payments to families and try to recoup them from the other parent rather than relying on individual parents to do the right thing or to be able to do the right thing, which does not always work in the real world. We believe there should be a more transparent, innovative and consistent approach to how maintenance is dealt with for social welfare customers to prevent their children living in poverty.

I will hand over to my colleague, Valerie Maher.