Pat Rabbitte (Dublin South West, Labour)

As the Combat Poverty Agency has pointed out, the total spend on child poverty this year is marginally less than last year. The time has come for additional resources to be targeted at families with children on low incomes as the Minister professed to do. The NESC is considering a proposal to institute a targeted income supplement, either as a supplementary child benefit or as a refundable tax credit. That proposal has been sent to the NESC to be studied. This means it will probably die a slow and quiet death. If the Government were serious about this it would have adopted the idea as its own. However it has no intention of introducing the scheme.

The children's author JK Rowling put it eloquently when she wrote:

Poverty is a bad place to be on your own, but the worst place on earth if you have a child with you. We will never know how much talent and ability has been stifled in poverty over the centuries but we can be sure that we will continue to live with ill health, crime and addiction until we succeed in eradicating it from as many children's lives as possible.

There is a direct link between child poverty and the poverty of imagination in our Government.

There is the question of how lone parents are treated in the social welfare code. Deputy Brennan has published some proposals on this, and while there are genuine concerns about how they might be implemented, they have merit. It is past time that we got beyond the anachronistic idea that being a parent is a problem, and the farcical situation that prevents lone parents from entering into long-term relationships for fear of losing their incomes.

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