Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

People who are entirely new to the system will be affected next week. I remind the Deputy, in response to his query, that a significant cohort of the 92,000 lone parents in this country do not come from Ireland. As I have said, approximately 18% of payments are made to non-Irish nationals. British nationals are the single largest group within the non-national category. As the Deputy knows, some of those people migrated into the UK from elsewhere before moving to Ireland. I would not like to say what the insurance status of those who migrate the Ireland after next week might be. When people come to Ireland, in some cases they can step relatively quickly into our lone parent system. However, they might not have built up the kind of entitlements I have mentioned.

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