Willie Penrose (Westmeath, Labour)

I am glad to have an opportunity to contribute to the debate on behalf of the Labour Party. The Bill provides for a number of measures announced in the budget and details the increases provided in child benefit but, as Deputy Stanton stated, they are still way behind the objective set out in various partnership agreements and fall well short of the solemn promise made by the Fianna Fáil and Progressive Democrats parties when they went to the polls in 2002. It is only one of a number of promises on which people were misled. The Bill also provides for improvements in the carer's benefit, respite care and disability payment schemes. The increase in the capital disregard for means-tested schemes is important.

One of the core objectives of the Labour Party is the achievement of a fair society. RH Tawney stated: "A society is free in so far and only so far as its institutions and policies are such as to enable all members to grow to their full stature." That is the Labour Party's vision. We want our social security system to do more than make weekly payments. It should be used creatively to encourage and enable social and economic participation. The fair society, which is our objective and which we will present to the people over the next few years as we prepare for the general election, is about the expansion of freedoms that people should be able to enjoy. It is based on the premise that everyone of us is born with immense talents, gifts and possibilities. A successful country allows people to unlock that potential and make the most of that which is within them to achieve. It should know no boundary of birth or background. Therefore, we will set out to develop a way for our social security system to play a maximum role in enabling full participation to the best of each individual's potential in our society and economy.

I set out this background because a Berlin-Boston argument has been put forward by the Progressive Democrats element of the Government. At one time the Minister for Social and Family Affairs, Deputy Brennan, was charged with being part of that brigade. Now he has changed place and I compliment him on the ad lib comments he made recently. Ireland is much closer to the Berlin model than the Boston model and our party articulates a vision and philosophy nearer to the Berlin model. Up to now the Boston model has been the predominant thinking within Government rather than the European ideal in terms of social protection.

We spend much less on social protection than most European countries and are second only to the United States with regard to the high proportion of people living in poverty. The Labour Party agrees with the OECD and ESRI conclusion that to reduce poverty, to which Deputy Stanton alluded, we must increase the amount we spend on social protection. Many countries are challenged to fund social security commitments. We have all responded to the exogenous pressures of globalisation and international competitors with their policy of low taxation and wage moderation. This intensifies pressure on expanding social protection funding, but does not make it impossible.

Lower tax rates set the macro fiscal context for social security policy. We can only afford a decent social security scheme with the capacity to take people out of poverty if we can fund it. High employment participation can make social security payments more affordable. High employment ensures the income tax base is as large as it can be and that as few working people as possible are reliant on social security. However, that is only one aspect.

We are one of the richest countries in the world, but we have a very high level of poverty. Two groups of particular concern are children and those in low-paid work. We must never forget the huge numbers of people in low-paid work living in poverty. We have failed to recognise that because the Government loves to quote the statistics for those who are in work. That ignores the fact that many of those at work are low paid. This debate has raised this issue.

Some journalists seem to have had the bright idea to perpetuate the right-wing thinking and ideology of some of those ivory-tower professors who do not know the reality of what is on the ground. Perhaps if they read the article I wrote for The Irish Times in September 2004, some of them might not have got into trouble, and neither would their editor. They should have taken time out to review that solid article which was based on empirical data and the real life experience of myself and my Labour Party colleagues on whose behalf I wrote it. No doubt it was written on behalf of every politician in the House who has witnessed the real poverty experienced by lone parents and those in work on low incomes. We must never forget these people and these issues.

Throughout the years of the Celtic tiger, child poverty remained virtually unchanged, with nearly one quarter of all children affected. While we had a decade of unprecedented prosperity and growth, a quarter of our children remained in poverty. That is an awful indictment of Government policy over the past decade. Children of lone parents are especially vulnerable in this regard. Despite the welcome fall in unemployment during the 1990s, there has been a worrying increase in the number of working people in poverty. While only 8.3% of those at work were in poverty in 1994, by 2001 the figure had risen to 18.8%, a 250% increase. These are Government measures of poverty. The Government often uses consistent poverty as a measure, but this is an outdated concept and method of measuring poverty.

The ESRI, which practically brought in the parameters and introduced the indicators, now says the method should be scrapped and binned. It knows it is no longer up to date and that the definition of poverty must be widened. This means matters are worse. Children and those in poverty must receive special care and attention and policy objectives must be set out to deal with the particular circumstances in which they find themselves. We must deal with this issue.

There is truth in the mantra that a job is the best route out of poverty. We all encourage full employment or high levels of employment for all people of labour market age who are able to work. It is important to remember that not everybody who takes up a job gets out of poverty. We seem to ignore that. There is a plethora of policies intended to encourage work and, therefore, social inclusion. However, many of these have become ineffective through not operating earnings disregards in line with inflation, for example, with regard to one-parent family payments, participation in and retention of the secondary schemes and the back to school clothing and footwear allowance.

These schemes are now useless. Their great objectives have been rendered nugatory and nullified because of the failure to update the disregards necessary to allow people free-flow into work without being let down with a bang when their secondary benefits are wiped away in one fell swoop. Poverty then sets in and instead of the boat being lifted, it tilts and sinks and dislodges the participants when the aim had been to get them out of the poverty trap and into work.

I accept the view of successive Governments that the best route out of poverty is through a job. However, if the job is not accompanied by ancillary measures which ensure the poverty is tackled root and branch, we will find ourselves with increasing poverty figures such as where 8.3% in 1994 became 18.8% in 2001. We must ensure that the operation of disregards is in line with inflation and that we do not unduly tighten the regulations of any of the schemes thereby making it harder to retain secondary benefits. These are issues that must be examined.

I wrote an article in September on the lone parent issue. I spent about a week trying to get the statistics, but I succeeded in getting them together. In the 2002 census, 150,634 lone parent households were listed. Lone mothers accounted for 85% of the total, almost 80,000 lone parent families, in receipt of support. These are the unvarnished public statistics. However, the census figures do not reveal how vulnerable lone parent families are, nor how their predicament in this prosperous country is getting worse rather than better. Many see this simplistically as somebody else's problem.

Lone parenthood can arise for any of us and few people choose to become lone parents. Lone parenthood can arise through death, divorce, desertion, separation, imprisonment of a partner or through an unplanned pregnancy. Whatever the cause, it is usually a traumatic event for both the lone parent and the affected children. The initial stages of adaptation to lone parenthood can be difficult. Equally difficult are the long-term prospects for lone parents. Internationally and in Ireland, the evidence is that lone parent families are at very high risk of poverty and that such poverty is persistent. This is determined largely by the prospects and feasibility of employment for the lone parent.

Employment for lone mothers is low in Ireland, as it is in the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands and a number of other EU member states, yet employment is the key to raising lone mothers out of the poverty to which their family circumstances have often condemned them. It can be difficult for lone parents to take up work, even if there is work on offer. Children must be cared for, despite the fact that there is no second parent to share the responsibility. Work must be found which facilitates this requirement, for example, when children need to be taken to and collected from school.

Many lone parent mothers, the largest group, have low educational qualifications and can, therefore, only find low paid insecure employment. For many lone parents work will be impossible without the provision of paid child care. For low wage earners also, the cost of child care can take the whole of any income earned and leave the parents and families no better off than when the parent is not working. The poverty of lone parents is largely determined by the level and regulation of lone parents' State payments, access to child care support, the cost of child care, the type of employment and employment opportunities available to them.

I had a look at how we measure up in Ireland. The first comprehensive State support for lone parent families was introduced in 1997 by my colleague, Proinsias De Rossa, MEP, when he was Minister for Social Welfare, as it was known then. The one-parent family payment applied to all one-parent families regardless of the reason for the situation. It was innovative at the time since the regulations allowed lone parents to work and earn up to €146.50 per week without losing any of their allowances. It also allowed them to earn up to €293 per week before the social welfare payment was lost. Notwithstanding that enlightened approach being taken to lone parents in 1997, in the past seven years there has been no increase, despite repeated requests from CORI and the One Parent Exchange and Network, OPEN, in the amount of income that can be earned before the State payment is lost.

The Irish Congress of Trade Unions carried out a survey between 1997 and 2000 which indicated that child care costs had doubled. It is probably safe to assume they have doubled again between 2000 and 2005. As a result, lone parents wishing to work are in an impossible position. They would lose all their State payments before they could earn enough to cover Ireland's extremely high child care costs even before they would have to address living expenses. This problem needs to be examined.

In 1994, lone parent households accounted for one in every 20 households in consistent poverty. In 2001, that figure had risen to one in five. As Deputy Stanton stated, lone parents in receipt of one-parent family payments have a higher rate of consistent poverty than any other category of social welfare recipients. Is it any wonder we hear stories from lone parents such as the one I met recently? A parent with two children told me that she does a big weekly shopping after being paid on Thursday. She always looks out for special offers and just buys the basics but there is usually nothing left by Wednesday apart from some mince in the freezer, sausages, soup and bread. Some lone parents are literally living on the bread line with little or nothing left to pay for those items the rest of us would consider essential such as back to school needs, children's birthday treats or Christmas costs. Those are the real facts. If Mr. Myers comes down from his ivory tower and takes Professor Walsh with him I will give them a tour around Mullingar or any town or city in the country, show them the reality and dispel some of the myths that exist. The total number of lone parent households has remained fairly constant for the past six years. They accounted for 11.2% of total private households in 1996 and 11.6% in 2002. Moreover, a sizeable proportion, nearly one sixth or 15%, of lone parent households are headed by a man, not a woman.

The Minister's reference to births to single mothers was correct. The total number of births to women under 20 years old, whether lone parents or not, has remained fairly constant over the past 30 years at about 3,000 per year. In recent years both the actual numbers and percentage of births to this group has fallen from 5.35% of total births in 2001 to 4.55% in 2003. That information comes from page 27 of census data, specifically the vital statistics for the fourth quarter and the yearly summary for 2003, published by the Central Statistics Office in May 2004. I look up my own data.

When one examines the number of women in receipt of the one-parent allowance, the age profile for 2002, which again defeats another argument of those ivory tower people, shows that only 3.2% in receipt of this allowance are under 20 years old, while the majority, 51.4%, are aged between 30 and 59. Where did those people get their great ideas? I want to recommend reading to those people who live in ivory towers: One Size Fits All? Irish Government's Failed Approach to One-Parent Families 1994-2004, which was written by Camille Loftus and published by OPEN. That is recommended reading for Kevin Myers and Professor Walsh. The Walsh-Myers scenario of an explosion of teenage births in recent years and the suggestion that "large numbers of young women are drawn into the perils of early and unmarried motherhood" to quote Mr. Myers's bungled apology in The Irish Times of 10 February is false. Let them deal with statistics in future.

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