Ms Karen Kiernan:

I am grateful for the invitation to address the committee. I am here to represent the ten national organisations that are the members of the National One Parent Family Alliance. I am CEO of One Family and chair of the alliance. I am joined by Dr. Trisha Keilthy, head of social justice and policy with the Society of St. Vincent de Paul.

Since 2016, at least nine independent reports detailing the poor living standards and inequalities experienced by one-parent families have been published. Each of these reports paints a similar devastating picture of children growing up in the grip of poverty, deprivation and housing insecurity. We know that the vast majority of children living in daily consistent poverty in Ireland live in one-parent families. We know that lone parents are more likely to have lower incomes from employment, higher poverty rates, less savings and higher reliance on social welfare. They are much more likely to be homeless or living in insecure accommodation, and to experience stigma and social isolation. All the data and evidence show that it is structural barriers that are the problem. It is the inappropriate policies, legislation and the cost of the living that mean that one-parent families are poorer than two-parent families. This is not down to individual parental failings or poor choices. It is on the State.

The research also tells us the solutions. It provides policymakers with a whole series of solutions that can help move these children and families out of poverty for good. The programme for Government includes the commitment to fully implement the 2017 report on the position of lone parents in Ireland by the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Employment Affairs and Social Protection. It is imperative that government understands and removes the barriers, and promotes policies and laws that support children living in one-parent families to have a life free from daily poverty.

The recommendations we are going to focus on today are as follows. There is a need for our social protection system to be based on evidence and to be benchmarked against the cost of a minimum essential standard of living. We want to have the jobseeker's transition payment, JST, extended to parents until their children reach the end of secondary school in recognition of the additional caring responsibilities of lone parents and the much higher costs of raising a teenager. We want the discrimination against babies of lone parents ended by amending the Parent’s Leave and Benefit Act to ensure one-parent families have the same level of support as two-parent families. We want investment in publicly-provided early years care and education with free childcare for children in one-parent families. This is in line with the commitments under the EU child guarantee. We need to develop an independent system to assess and enforce child maintenance payments and to ensure they are not counted as parental income or doubly assessed by our social protection system. Housing is crucial so we are recommending a specific task force in the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage to review the impact of housing insecurity on one-parent families and develop appropriate solutions, including a much-needed family homelessness plan. To highlight the education point that has been made, we need Student Universal Support Ireland, SUSI, grants to be made available to parents who wish to study part time.

In order to achieve these priorities, we strongly recommend that a new national child poverty plan contain an ambitious poverty reduction target and supporting actions specifically for one-parent families. In order to achieve that, we are recommending that an interdepartmental senior officials group be established to co-ordinate supports to ensure a successful decrease in child poverty rates so that the next generation will not have to live the way this one is unfortunately living at the moment.