Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Why reduce people to poverty and affect the next generation? That is what we are doing. With break-ups in particular, this applies to people who were comfortably off and the next thing their world falls apart. We all come across such cases. The most common case of maintenance is where there has been marriage breakdown and so on. That tends to be dramatic and traumatic for the children. My view is that adding a poverty layer into this is only adding to our future problems. We are being penny wise and pound foolish. We should, within reason, allow people to keep maintenance money or whatever. I am not talking about very wealthy people who have big maintenance orders against them but people who are better off in order that they do not experience a collapse in their lifestyle. That would be no harm because of the future implications of poverty versus a more stable and better funded upbringing.

It is very important that the courts strictly enforce maintenance because that would really help one-parent families who have access to maintenance to keep out of the poverty trap. There is no point in pulling everybody down. There was a saying at home about people who, if you were down a hole, would pull you out but if you climbed a ladder would pull the ladder from under you. I accept that social welfare is great at stopping people falling down a hole but, at times, the minute they try to climb the ladder, the Department goes after them with a vengeance with means testing.