Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

If a spouse in a family earns €400 per week, the annual total is €20,800. A person in receipt of jobseeker's allowance earns approximately €9,776, leading to a combined income of €30,576. If that person has two children, he or she would receive €34,000 or more. That is a tight amount of money, particularly for someone with two children, but we had to draw the line somewhere and this is where we chose to draw it.

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