Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I compliment Deputy Troy on his contribution to this debate and I hope the Minister will join in the debate in an open-minded way to address one of the most acute issues in our society.

During the affluent times we had a much greater child benefit and also had the early childhood supplement. As a result of cutbacks, child benefit has been vastly reduced and the early childhood supplement has been abolished. We introduced the free preschool year, but, as Deputy Troy pointed out, while that is very good for the children, it does not resolve the dilemma faced by parents who have to or want to go to work.

Over the past five or six years the group which has suffered most in the downturn of the economy is the group with big mortgages and young families. They have been hit by the treble whammy of high child care costs, reduced incomes and very large mortgages. We need an holistic approach to the issues. The Government has introduced a number of measures that have posed further difficulties for lone parents regarding the support they get.

I have long argued that we should look at the family income supplement in a more holistic way than we have in the past. An advantage of a scheme such as the family income supplement is that it only helps those who are in employment. In addition, apart from the carer's allowance, it is the most generous in the method of assessment - it disregards the USC, PRSI, union subscriptions and any income tax paid. We could go further with the family income supplement and could target the assistance to those who most need it. People on equal incomes are facing very different pressures in our society. Those in the older age group, who are at the peak of their careers and have their mortgages largely paid, do not face the same pressures faced by working families with young children and large mortgages.

Many people, who entered the workforce and were lucky enough to get jobs since the downturn in the economy, did not take on mortgages given that very few houses have been sold in the past five years. The day-to-day financial pressures on them are smaller. I have long argued that the mortgage cost should be taken into account in the means test for family income supplement. Doing that would not give a huge write-off of mortgages to everybody across the board but would focus on the future. It would clearly signal that people with children and who have a roof over their heads are not as mobile as anyone else in society. They face many challenges that are not faced by people without young children. Over the years in my clinics I have listened to the challenge faced by parents living in rented houses asking why they cannot get a house at the same side of town because they do not want to take the children out of school and move them again.

If as a society we are serious about the future, stability is incredibly important for children and, as a consequence, for their parents. I ask the Minister not to leave the issue as simply the subject of this debate, rather I hope over the course of tonight and tomorrow night new ideas will be put forward throwing out some options that might be worth examining that could be targeted and that would deal with a problem we all know exists.

It has become fashionable in recent times to treat all people as if their circumstances were equal but that is not true nor is it right. People in different circumstances face totally different challenges. If we believe in the rhetoric of what we say about the importance of children in their own right and the importance of their welfare for their future, and if we believe in the importance of children in terms of their possible contribution to society in the future, it is well worth investing and targeting support for children. In this regard, we must support the parents of children. When I hear people say the mortgage issue is equal across the board, I do not believe that is true. The challenge in regard to the mortgage issue faced by many families where there are children is much greater than in other circumstances.

When I was Minister for Social Protection I noted some fascinating statistics. In the past when we talked about female participation in the workforce, we tended to talk about the high end of the scale and not focus enough on the challenges faced by people in relatively modestly paid employment who are trying to rear children, to pay for child care and hold down a job at the same time. One of the fascinating facts regarding the number in receipt of illness benefit is that up to the age of 30 the number of men in receipt of the benefit exceeds the number of women, but as the age profile increases there is a huge increase in the number of women in receipt of the benefit and it reaches the point where twice as many women as men are in receipt of it, and as the age profile increases into the fifties the number of women in receipt of it decreases and more men than women are in receipt of it. There is a rational explanation for this related to the fact that many women find themselves in the impossible position where the cost of child care is nearly equal to the cost of going to work. I have been always a great advocate of the idea that we would recognise that reality and that we would provide extended paid maternity leave or a home-maker's allowance or benefit which would allow a woman to draw a stamp to stay at home with her children for a certain period and then return to the workforce. However, there is no point in expecting people, if they are on modest wages, to return to the workforce if the cost of child care is so utterly prohibitive that they would have very little take home pay when they factor in the cost of travelling to work and other expenses.

My colleague has sparked an interesting debate. He has put forward constructive ideas. This is a case where we all know in our hearts and souls that change and targeting is needed. We could all work together to bring about a radical new proposal that would help one of the groups in our society who face the most challenges at present. All of us who know people in this situation, and every Deputy does, would recognise that if we were to get together and bring forward policies for radical change, which could be done in a cost effective and targeted way, we would do a great long-term service to our society. I suggest that we do not simply leave this issue as the subject of a three-hour debate. It should be referred for further discussion to the Oireachtas committee that deals with this issue in order that an all-party joint committee report could be drawn up, using the ideas put forward by my colleague and ideas that no doubt will be put forward by the Minister. In that way, a cross-party proposal could be agreed and we could then try to persuade the people who hold the purse strings to release them in a targeted way and work to resolve this issue.

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