John Curran (Dublin Mid West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I would like to thank Focus Ireland and One Family for their presentations. I do not want to reiterate the points made but Focus Ireland made a very specific point, which the committee was really taken with, and Deputy Brady referred to it. At the outset, we were told that 25% of families are one parent families, whereas 65% of homeless families are one parent families. That is rather disproportionate to the general population. A specific piece of work needs to be done to identify what the causes are. There is more than one cause and I acknowledge that. If we are to try to address a specific problem, we probably need to know as much as possible, because there is a cohort of people who need to be helped.

We all have anecdotal evidence of the constituents we meet. I met a lone parent family which had become homeless. However, 18 months ago, it was not a lone parent family. There was a relationship break-up and there was transitional accommodation. Their situation eventually fell apart for a whole range of reasons. The relationship break-up may have been as a result of economic stresses and pressures. These situations are very complex. One may see a lone parent family today, but a short time ago that may not have been the case. Why is there that disproportionate 65% figure? We really need to understand that in more detail if we are to try to prevent such situations.

The prevention of people becoming homeless is one of the things that Mr. Allen and other people working with the homeless have always emphasised, and I fully support that. This is a specific cohort of people who are much more vulnerable, much more at risk, and are becoming homeless. We need to know more about that.

I thank One Family for its presentation, which was quite specific and detailed. It rightly referred back to the changes made in 2012, which saw the Department of Social Protection begin to progressively introduce measures to encourage lone parents to return to the workforce. That is the policy position, whether or not one agrees with it, and what flows from that is important.

Representatives of the Department of Social Protection appeared before the committee some time later in 2016 because there had been an immediate impact, but there was also the question of whether we were striving to achieve the longer term objective. The representatives made the point that it would take several years to quantify the impact of the reforms. However, the early indications were that by the end of 2015 more than 3,000 lone parents had become new entrants to the family income supplement scheme. That was an indication that those included in that group had increased the level of their employment participation.

There are two elements I want to address. On the research carried out and analysis made of the longer term benefits, the delegates have rightly acknowledged what happened in year one and so forth, but are we on the road towards achieving the longer term objective announced by the Department? What is the delegates' view of its interim figure of 3,000 at the end of 2015? Is it a meaningful figure?

Deputy John Brady indicated that he might have further questions, but I will let the delegates address those questions first. We will start with One Family.