Joan Collins (Dublin South Central, Independent)
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I will be brief. I thank the witnesses for coming in. I know that Age Action and Social Justice Ireland have done tremendous work over the past seven years, highlighting inequality and campaigning vigorously for budgets that were tested and checked for equality. Unfortunately, however, that has not happened. I take on board everything the witnesses have said. We know what we will get back from the Minister concerning a number of these issues. Yesterday morning, I heard an RTE interview with the Minister for Social Protection where he, quite rightly, said that Fianna Fáil cut the lone parent's allowance by €16. However, he then denied that the last Government played any role in cutting that allowance. They may not have cut anything, but they determined the conditionality of the payment. The interviewer did not know enough about the lone parent's payment to be able to challenge that. In effect, we clearly know that in July 2015 a lone parent on €9.15 per hour with a 20-hour contract was earning around €4.53. In 2017, that will be down to €80.32 for a working parent. That is the reality for lone parents on a 35-hour week. I wanted to raise that important point at today's meeting. We cannot let someone go on air and say that there have been no cuts to the lone parent's allowance over the last five years, or since the child turned seven.

While it is quite clear that we will not get all of them, what areas really need to be pushed which, in the witnesses' view, would have a significant impact on older people?