Ms Valerie Maher:

Senator Ardagh said there was a high proportion of lone parents in her constituency of Dublin 12. They found that when working in minimum wage jobs, it was difficult for them to access education to allow them to increase their earning potential. It backs up our point that, particularly for someone on the minimum wage who might be accessing the family income supplement, they cannot currently access other educational supports such as the back-to-education allowance because it is not one of the qualifying payments for that scheme. Therefore, some people in minimum wage jobs are stuck there and cannot improve their earning potential because they cannot access education.

Senator Humphreys referred specifically to the ESRI report on outcomes of the back-to-education allowance. The report said that work is better at reducing poverty than for people who try to access employment after a back-to-education scheme. Since that report was written, housing costs have increased significantly. I wonder, therefore, if being in work still reduces poverty when the majority of one's wages go on housing and child care? An update on that report might be beneficial because there has been such a significant increase in housing costs.

The ability for work to reduce poverty is dependent on earnings. It would depend on how much a person is able to earn and whether work pays in that context, as well as the stability of that work and whether a person is in precarious employment.

Not all lone parents in education are in receipt of the back-to-education allowance. In particular, if they are not in receipt of rent supplement it means they can stay on their jobseeker's transition or one-parent family payment and still be in full-time education. The report does not show the full picture. That is because there may be lone parents who have access to education and who have progressed into employment whom that report will not have captured.

I acknowledge Senator Humphreys' point, which is a fair one, that just because a report says something we do not like, it does not mean we should not take it on board and allow that to inform our policy stances and, indeed, policy responses from Government.

Deputy Brady mentioned targeted versus universal payments.

I took from what the Deputy said that he supports us in that regard. It is certainly helpful for us to see some of the costings for it. The rationale for it is that, in the context of limited resources, we would like to see what resources are being targeted at the poorest children. That is why we say the qualified child increase should be targeted at the poorest families, even if it is only a short term, interim measure in the context of the recession and specifically the financial impact that reforms have had on lone parent families. Can we target the limited resources available to the Government at these families to alleviate some of the negative impacts they have suffered?