Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)

I am glad to have an opportunity to speak on the Social Welfare and Pensions Bill 2012. I am surprised by the changes the Minister has made to the social welfare system because they appear to amount to a concerted attack on women in particular. An examination of her proposals shows the change to the averaging rule has made the position of many women much worse. I refer to women who worked for a period before leaving the workforce to rear children and returned to employment subsequently. The Minister's change will reduce payments for many such women because they will have a contribution average lower than 48 weeks. This is a surprising change because if I were to check the speeches the Minister made while in opposition, I suspect I will find she argued the social welfare code penalised women for being forced out of the workforce. I have no doubt she recognises, as I did while Minister for Social Protection, that while the system was correctly based on averages in its early years, it continued to be based on averages for much too long and became inherently unfair. I could provide her with details of cases which support that view. For example, I encountered a case of a person who, having worked for one week when she was 22 years old, left the workforce and subsequently returned to employment many years later. Although she accrued plenty of stamps and contribution years, her contribution average was approximately 24 because of the week she had worked when she was much younger. If she had a right to discard that week, she would have qualified for a full pension.

The previous Government had started to implement a decision to move to a total contribution system. This would have meant a person's total contributions amounting to 30 years would receive a full pension irrespective of the average contribution figure. While the averaging system was not great when my party was in power, at least it provided that if a person's contribution average fell below 48, his or her payment would not fall over a cliff, so to speak. The Minister's decision to penalise those who left the workforce to do the important job of caring for children or elderly people before returning to employment subsequently predominantly affects women, although I have encountered cases of men who were caught by this anomaly.

The Minister then moved on to lone parents. I believe 90% of one-parent families are headed by women. While many people believe single parents make up a homogenous group, they include people whose marriages have broken down, people who never married and many others. Single parents are a wide-ranging group of people. All the surveys indicate they experience the greatest levels of poverty and disadvantage. For the short time I was Minister for Social Protection, an informal group consisting of pensioners, lone parents and others used to meet in the Department every six to eight weeks. Some well-heeled pensioners, including people who had incomes of €70,000, €80,000 and €100,000 with contributory and private pensions to match, are good at making a great deal of noise. I used to impress on the pensioners in the group that statistics show lone parents are a disadvantaged group.

When I joined the Department there was considerable evidence that creating a distance between lone parents and the workforce was not good in the long term. I was also swayed by the arguments made by my predecessor and departmental officials that the social welfare system was deficient in not requiring those in receipt of one-parent family allowance to engage with the labour market until their youngest child was 22 years old. The evidence showed this was not the best system, although changing it would require putting supports in place. I recall the Labour Party being highly critical of the measures I introduced to change the system. I also remember pointing out that under the old system, a lone parent participating in second chance education could find herself in the same university class as her child. The idea a person would be required to baby sit a child of 20 or 21 years did not stand up to logic. For this reason, I was in the process of progressively reducing the age at which the lone parent payment ceased. My proposal to reduce the age to 13 years was sharply criticised by the then Labour Party spokesperson on social welfare. During the Committee Stage debate on the relevant social welfare Bill I listened carefully to the then spokesperson and later double-checked the position to ascertain the oldest age at which children move from primary school to secondary school. I found that if I were to raise the proposed age from 13 to 14 years, I would guarantee that every child would have jumped the bridge into secondary school where the school day is much longer. On foot of this finding, I amended the Bill on Report Stage to make this change.

As Minister, I identified the four levels of child care support needed. It is not needed for students who have completed the leaving certificate. Although young people of that age need contact with their parents, they do not need a parent to be home at 4.30 p.m. or 5 p.m., and the chances are young people in third level education would not have returned home at that time. While it is important parents are available when children are in secondary school, informal arrangements can be made at modest cost for children to be cared for from the time they come home from school until the time a parent returns from work. However, I did promise that as we were introducing this over a number of years, I would act in good faith as long as I was there, but there had to be child supports and after school arrangements made, particularly in areas where there was a high concentration of lone parents.

When we look at the care that a child needs when in primary school and when we look at the time at which primary schools close, we come to a completely higher level of support. The Minister suddenly decides in the budget, at a time when the jobs are not there anyway, that we must have a whole lot of one-parent allowance recipients on the dole queue, even if they do not wish to take up employment and they want to be full-time parents. I think that is regressive. I do not believe that the Minister has the child care arrangements in place to cover this. Child care costs are quite expensive, so this is negative.

It is interesting that when I spoke to the various representative organisations about the change I made, I think it would be fair to say that there was a certain amount of concern. Some of them had been supportive while some of them were concerned, but they basically agreed that it was workable in the timescale I had outlined, as long as the Department honoured the commitment in respect of after school care and so on. It is fair to say that the reaction of these bodies is totally different this time, and a new body, SPARK, has been set up. That group would share my concerns that the child care arrangements are not in place at an affordable cost to make this possible. I think the Minister will be well served by withdrawing this proposal and bringing it back when she has got the agreement of the one-parent family organisations on child costs.

It would be interesting to hear what a court would declare if somebody challenged the constitutionality of this on the basis of the provision in the Constitution in respect of women not being forced by economic necessity to engage in labour outside of the home, to the detriment of their children. It is a provision in the Constitution which I would like to see updated to state "parents" rather than women, but it is one which, in spite of the derision in which it is held by many, could come to the aid of women who feel this is exactly what the Minister is trying to do. I would be interested to see what the Supreme Court would make of a case brought by a parent of children aged seven, eight and 12 and who is being forced to take up employment.

We then have to add the Minister's decision on the CE schemes to all of this. It is fair to say that in an objective world, we should never have given the two child dependant allowances. It should never have happened. I am sure at the time there was probably a big row and I have no doubt the Labour Party Members were roaring at us that we were in some way being unfair to one-parent families in the CE schemes, and the double allowance came in. I often believe that if even a thing has a flaw, it is like giving a child ice cream and then suddenly taking it away. If the child was never given the ice cream in the first place, he might not miss it, but he will sure miss it if it is given to him and then taken away. Many people had come to depend on this level of payment and suddenly swiping €29.80 per child per week just like that was callous and disregarding. The Minister then moved and said that those with a disability and one-parent families could not claim the part social welfare payment and the full CE payment. There is a lot of logic to that, except we know that again we do not have the provisions yet put in place to facilitate the one-parent family to go on the CE schemes due to the child care costs. While it is a perfectly rational decision for children over 14 and 15 and there is no significant child care costs, especially on a 19 and a half hour week or a week on and week off basis, it is completely different when young children are involved. Since the one-parent family payment will now be confined to those with children under seven, this was an unnecessary move because the accessibility of one-parent families to the double payment would have been seriously curtailed in its own right, and effectively over time would only have been available where children were under seven and where there were significant child care costs.

It seems the Minister is very determined to make targeted changes against women. I might also say that she joined the rest of her colleagues in the targeting of rural Ireland when she changed the means disregard for farm assist from 70% to 85%. Ministers tell us - all the experts told us too - that if the tax rate is raised to over 60% or 65%, it becomes a complete disincentive. Under farm assist and most of these means tested schemes, the disincentive level is now 85%. It used to be 70%. In other words, it is effectively a tax. People say it is social welfare, but it is the effective thing. The amount taken out of every euro was 70% and now it is 85%. I did not understand any of this until I went to rural Ireland, and I was shocked to find that when I went there, they took 100% of everything earned and then they wondered why there was no incentive for a person to improve his farming situation. The Minister is now going back to this Dickensian view of social welfare and believes that it is quite right for her to take 85 cent out of every euro earned and that there is still some incentive to get involved in self-employment.

A couple came into me recently and the husband was self-employed. The Minister's good officials will know how much I argued against all of this stuff in my short time in the Department, and regretted that I was not there for a longer period to do more about it. Every euro he earned from self-employment will take a euro out of his jobseeker's allowance. However, if he or his wife was in employment, the Department would disregard the first €60 and take 60% of the balance. What have we against self-employment in this country? What is our hatred of self-employment that for one person, we give some kind of a break - although in reality it is high taxation - but for the other, we claw back a euro from every euro?

In the case of the CE schemes, it is ironic that the rug of the disability payment was pulled at a time when the partial capacity allowance was being brought in, and I understand the Minister is at last progressing on that. The idea was that people in receipt of an invalidity pension would be measured for their disability, as it were, and allowed keep a proportion of the payment, depending on the severity of their disability, and to work in the commercial economy. While that is being done for people who have a job, manage to make contributions and be entitled to a non-means tested payment, the exact opposite is being done for people with disabilities who never had the opportunity to get a full-term commercial job and have depended on schemes. They are being told they cannot keep any of their disablement payment even though they are working for the rest of the payment for a very low wage and there are also other costs, such as the cost of getting to and from work if they do not own their own transport.

I would love to have an opportunity to talk about pensions. I want to ask the Minister what happened to the sovereign bonds and-----

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