Anne Rabbitte (Fianna Fail)

I really welcome this Economic and Social Research Institute report. A bespoke piece of work like this gives us a great understanding and a wider context. At the end of the day, it helps us form policy and a direction when it talks about €773 million, because the budget last year for social protection was about €2.5 billion. I was doing a bit of research to see if there is money in the pot, and that is what has been consistently in the pot. When we look at how the report has been done, income poverty and material deprivation are used as the two measures or the two tools. When we look at the income poverty aspect, the witnesses touched on that relating to the single parent and also talked about the female. In our previous contributions we were talking about widows' pensions. If a widow is receiving a widow's pension they cannot get sick because they cannot have illness benefit or they cannot have a second contribution, that means that family is severely impacted. That heightens our conversations around that. In situations where a parent is disabled, and the associated poverty within that family, how does that impact on the children? One can only guess. Have witnesses broken down the categories that makes up the low-income families?