Ms Karen Kiernan:

The national one parent family alliance was set up in Covid because we were all so concerned as national organisations about what was specifically happening for one parent families and the children who live in them. We have kept going with a strong focus on socioeconomic issues because we know that most poor children in Ireland live in one parent families. If there was the political will and mechanism to focus on those and help lone parents be successful to move from social welfare into employment, or make work pay for those who are in low-income employment, their children will be much better off and those measures will be very impactful in reducing the national levels of child poverty.

I have a couple of points, some of which were raised and we did not get to address them. On homelessness, 58% of all homeless families in Ireland are one parent families. Generally, it is a mum with one or two young children. Month on month, that is increasing. It is a crisis. We have called it out for at least two years. There is still no HAP family homeless strategy. There is nothing in the budget. Homelessness was not mentioned. There have to be better preventative measures that could be taken to stop this number of one parent families disproportionately ending up in homelessness and those children growing up there.

Flexible working and working for home would be valuable to all parents but particularly if you are parenting on your own and you have a long commute and your childcare service may need to close suddenly, as Ms Heeney said, is not available or the parent cannot do the commute and make it all work. Of course, it is the obvious thing to do for all parents. To go back to our mantra, if you design a system that works for one parent families, no more than designing a system that works for a child with a disability, it will work for everyone else as well. Go with the people who are finding it toughest, design systems to support them and it will improve.

A lot of lone parents find it very difficult to get employment and stay in it because of childcare, no after-school care and because they may be pushed into low-earning and low-income employment, which is often out of hours and shift work. If you do not have family support as a lone parent, you are probably not working and you are probably not moving on in your career.

We are concerned that the Department of Social Protection needs to have a stronger education first approach to employment. It is possibly not the same for young people because to make it as an older person and as a parent, you may need a degree and postgraduate degree to be able to earn enough to get off income supports. There is not always that time and support built into the system. One Family has a really strong, evidence-based bridging programme, new futures. It is not funded by the State in Ireland. It is not rolled out or mainstreamed and yet, it has a 75% success rate for lone parents who participate in it. We need to see more of that.

To finish on the integrated policy planning, this has kind of been our theme for the day. One Family was fortunate to be asked to do a presentation at the recent child poverty summit that the Department of Taoiseach held. We focused our five or six minutes on a video of parents' voices and their direct experiences of the lack of integration and the challenges they were facing. We really exhorted the policymakers and politicians in the room to please do something about the systems. You can get much better value for money and you do not need extra money but you need to change how things are operating. I will end with that point. We would be very happy to send to the committee our words and the video we shared that day if that would be of help.