Ms Carly Bailey:

To echo that, we talk with people all the time and these ideas around shame, anxiety, fear and uncertainty - basically creating poverty traps. It is really difficult to exit a poverty trap. The system is creating those poverty traps and it is just not doing enough to help people out of those, which is what we are advocating for. There are also many reasons somebody is parenting alone. There are all sorts of reasons, including relationship breakdown or maybe the death of a partner. Very often, it can also come as a result of domestic abuse or coercive control. We already have people who are potentially very vulnerable, upset and there is a lot going in their own lives. If the extra burden of bureaucracy, the uncertainty of it all, the stress, having to reach out to HCCI, One Family Ireland and others is added in, it is a constant issue. We were just talking before we came in about somebody who is having an issue at the moment and I believe my colleague said it has been going on six years. She just keeps giving up multiple ways along the way because it is just too overwhelming and gets too much that she has to put it away for a little bit and get on with something else. It is taking time away from their child. As an example, if a person's youngest child is under the age of seven, he or she is on a one-parent family payment and perhaps eligible for the working family payment if he or she is working more than 19 hours a week, but there are issues around that regarding whether he or she is employed or self-employed and whether it is seasonal, it has to be almost like a constant fixed income and this is what we are talking about here.

There is no in-between or flexibility allowed in the system and that often does not work for parents in our situations. When that child moves to the magical age of seven, suddenly everything changes. Of course, it does not. If anything, as the child gets older, we know from all of the evidence that it actually costs more for children who are over the age of 12, which is why the qualified child payment has been differentiated in that way. The evidence is proof of that. A parent also has to move from the one-parent family payment to the jobseeker's transitional payment at that point in time and he or she is no longer eligible for the working family payment. A parent has to wait, potentially, there might be a review or an appeal and he or she has to apply for a social welfare assessment, which is another means-tested payment and a parent is only allowed to have a certain amount of capital means, which is only €5,000 whereas for the one-parent family payment and other payments, a parent can have €20,000 before it is taken into consideration. There are often many people who end up not being eligible for this emergency payment. It is not being made available for those of whom need it the most because of that. Realistically, for us, the jump to jobseeker's transitional payment would be improved by allowing it to be paid to people with children in full-time education. That is the obvious thing to do. People will then be encouraged to work. Were we to make some changes around the working family payment, it could be made eligible for that particular group. Thresholds can be reduced or tapered in order in a much more flexible system. That is very easy to do and could be done in budget 2025 for sure.