Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Family Law Acts are within the remit of the Department of Justice and Equality. They place a legal obligation on parents to maintain their children, regardless of whether they are the parents in receipt of welfare payments. In cases where the family unit has broken down, these obligations continue to apply and the relevant maintenance payments can be arranged either directly or through supports such as the Family Mediation Service, the Legal Aid Board and the courts. The arrangement of maintenance payments is, therefore, a civil matter between both parents, regardless of whether either of them is in receipt of a social welfare payment. In most cases, they are not.

In order to be eligible for a social welfare payment, an individual must satisfy the contingencies and criteria of the relevant scheme. Needless to say, eligibility for the one-parent family payment and the jobseeker's transitional payment requires the applicant to be parenting alone.

The seeking maintenance condition ensures that both of these schemes remain targeted exclusively at people who are parenting alone and therefore most in need of support.

In the vast majority of one-parent family payment and jobseeker’s transitional payment cases where maintenance is in payment, lone parents are successful in arranging maintenance themselves or under the family law provisions. The liability to maintain family provisions, contained in the social welfare legislation, is separate to, and does not negate or supersede parents' obligations under family law. Currently, contribution assessments can only be carried out where the one-parent family payment is in payment and that does not extend to other social welfare payments.

The Department is currently reviewing the liability to maintain family provisions. The options include extending the liability to maintain family provisions to jobseeker’s transitional and possibly other social welfare payments, or removing the requirement altogether. This is a very complex issue, and any changes would require significant legislative and operational changes potentially to family law as well as to social welfare law. Any legislative changes will be brought before the joint Oireachtas committee for pre-legislative scrutiny.

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