Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Deputy Boyd Barrett's proposal is to tell people who are lone parents, be it because their relationships ended or they had children on their own, that they should remain on social welfare for 18 years during some of the best years of their lives or even longer if they have more than one child. What tends to happen in that scenario is that someone stops being a long parent in his or her late 40s or early 50s. We just discussed meeting lone parents in community employment schemes and so on in Coolock. It can be difficult for people to return to education and training in order to get well-paid jobs. As I told the Deputy, all of the statistics across Europe, not just in Ireland, show that if a family relies only on social welfare and there is little work in the household, be it a one-parent or two-parent household, even a 20% to 45% participation rate in work reduces the risk of poverty in the household by more than 60%.

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