Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

From July 2015, lone parents with children aged seven and older will no longer be entitled to the one-parent family payment. This has become known as the Burton cut but, more than that, it is a brutal cut that will plunge thousands more children into consistent poverty, on top of all the other cuts that have affected lone parent families. Up to 30,000 lone parent families will be affected by this particular move. Thousands of those will have severe income reductions as a result, with some losing up to €140 a week. Others, for example, a lone parent working 20 hours a week on a minimum wage, will face a cut of €108 a week.

I do not understand how the Government can even contemplate introducing such a measure at the end of this month. The Taoiseach would know, and Fintan O'Toole put it very well in his article this morning in The Irish Times, that "A lone parent can't ditch a child and go off to work without access to education, childcare and a stable job with a living wage". This cut comes on top of a series of welfare cuts that have affected families, low-income families in particular, and lone parent families. The back to school allowance was cut by one third. The income disregard for lone parent families was cut by €147 a week to €90 a week. Community employment schemes, which were availed of significantly by lone parent families, have been gutted. There have been taxation changes that have impacted particularly hard on separated and lone parent families. The issue of access to education has not improved, and we have no Scandinavian child care model. The result of all of that is that consistent child poverty increased from approximately 6.8% in 2008 to almost double that percentage, 12%, in 2013.

The policy is not working. It is not getting lone parents back to work. It is having the opposite impact and it is driving people further out of work and into poverty. Some 60% of lone parents who were getting the one-parent family payment were working part-time outside the home in 2012. In 2014, that had gone down to 36%. My simple question to the Taoiseach is will the Government will reverse this policy and stop its implementation at the commencement of July?

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