Ms Mary Roche:

This is a meeting of the gender equality committee, but research shows us gender interacts with other organising categories such as race and class. If gender and class are taken together, it is within that context that we can talk about the position of lone parents. They are marginalised and they experience discrimination and economic disadvantage on the basis of their gender. Women take the bulk of the caring responsibilities in Ireland and across the globe and they also parent on their own. Moreover, we know from the work done by the Low Pay Commission that they are overwhelmingly positioned within the lower ranks of the labour market. They may be in precarious, low-paid employment and have poor working conditions. Even if they are working, they tend to be the working poor because they do not have access to a public childcare system, they are caught with unpaid caring responsibilities for the child and their ability to engage in the labour market means they are open to exploitation and to very low-paid positions. They can be stuck in poverty, as all the reports going back ten or 15 years have shown.

Coupled with that, there have been changes to the welfare system. Since 2013, we have seen the dismantling of supports that traditionally existed for lone parents. Their entitlement to the one-parent family allowance, for example, stops once their youngest child reaches the age of seven. I suppose this explains Mr. Peelo's statement about the need to decouple the welfare system, if we want to address poverty and deprivation in lone-parent households, from labour market participation. That goes back to the idea of a basic minimum income standard of living for every household. We have to have a support network of income beyond which we are not prepared to let people fall. No matter what these women do, they cannot improve their lot, so the onus has to be on the State to redesign a system whereby we can lift lone-parent families out of poverty.