Joan Collins (Dublin South Central, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I congratulate the committee on the report because much hard work went into it. I thank the Chairman for organising the committee to look at this area and produce a report. What really made the difference was that lone parents and Single Parents Acting for the Rights of Kids, SPARK, appeared before the committee and we had the report from Millar and Crosse which pulled previous information together.

That really fed into the committee. Too often at committees, we hear from civil servants and different groups that do not really reflect the sections of society affected by the changes. That is one of the reasons I am going to refer to what One Family and Single Parents Acting for the Rights of Kids, SPARK, said when the report was published and following the budget. One Family said that it was heartening the voices of lone parents had been heard by the committee through its continued, determined representation, that the committee reiterated and supported what it had evidenced in policy work and in submissions for the past decade, that the main challenges facing lone parents were child poverty, housing costs, availability of affordable child care, obtaining child maintenance payments, job activation, access to education and changes to the one parent family payment, that lone parents had waited long enough and that action was needed to ensure the Government provided a range of measures, including but not confined to, housing support, child care access, education prospects and in-work supports to empower one parent families to break free from long-term deprivation and poverty, that it acknowledged the extensive work that had gone into the completion of the report and that the next step was to ensure budget 2018 contained significant measures which could resource the recommendations and make them a reality and that, in particular, it supported the committee's recommendation to broaden access to and increase supports available to those in receipt of jobseeker's transition and the call for the establishment of a State body to seek and pursue maintenance payments.

After the report was published, SPARK said:

Last month, the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Social Protection issued a groundbreaking report on the welfare of lone parents. The debate around lone parents in Ireland has traditionally been a dualistic argument around work or welfare. This report, arguably for the first time, introduces the third strand into the debate, the role of the absent parent in the welfare of their child. We have a long history in Ireland of absolving absent fathers from responsibility, in respect of mother and baby homes and this tradition has continued.

It said that this was a welcome break from that.

It went on to say that in 2012, the Minister for Social Protection introduced reforms to lone parent payments which cut the income of working lone parents and those in education and training, that EU SILC, survey on income and living conditions, reports showed that since her reforms were introduced there had been a 50% increase in the consistent poverty rate for lone parent families, while concurrently there was a small reduction in the rate for the general population, that children in lone parent families were now over three times more likely to live in poverty than children in two parent families, that it believed a major reason for this was that one parent could legally walk away, that the committee undertook a comprehensive analysis of the reforms introduced by the Minister of Social Protection in budget 2012 and included oral testimony from officials from the Department and representatives of various organisations such as the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, Barnardos, Focus Ireland, One Family and SPARK.

SPARK also said that as a result of changes made by the Minister, the Department now writes to the non-custodial parent once the youngest child in a family turns seven and informs them they are no longer obliged to pay child maintenance, unless it is court ordered, that this has resulted in a 28% drop of families receiving maintenance and, according to the Department, only a third of families now receive maintenance, that in March of this year, the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women, UN CEDAW, committee called on Ireland to consider setting up a statutory maintenance system, that in this report the Oireachtas committee had now also called for a statutory child maintenance system and a review on how child maintenance was assessed by the Department and that it was essential that the Minister, Deputy Regina Doherty, considered the important findings in this report and acted on its recommendations and that taking child maintenance out of contentious litigation could only help heal separated families. This is an important point and I would like to see how that is progressing. Perhaps the Minister might make a few points around that.

After the budget, One Family welcomed the €5 weekly social welfare payment increase, and the household income threshold for FIS increase by €10 for families of up to three children, along with new housing initiatives. However, it said it was not enough to lift lone parents and their children out of the consistent poverty and deprivation that resulted from previous reform of the one-parent family payment, and to support them in overcoming systemic barriers in accessing education and employment. One Family was quite critical that the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection had released the Indecon independent review of the amendments to the one-parent family payment which should have formed the basis of changes in budget 2018 for social welfare dependent one-parent families. It said that increases should have been targeted and strategic to reach the poorest children and families across the board, following the evidence and Government commitments to lift 100,000 children out of poverty. It went on to refer to the Economic and Social Research Institute, ESRI, report, Poverty dynamics of social risk groups in the EU, in relation to the specific barriers faced by lone parents in both accessing work and their experience of higher levels of deprivation and child poverty. That paper draws on the EU-SILC dataset to investigate changes over the period 2004 to 2014 in the trends and dynamics in poverty for social risk groups in selected European countries representing different welfare regimes and that out of 11 EU countries, the persistent poverty gap in Ireland was the largest and that it also increased the most during the study’s timeframe.

That contradicts the point the Minister made in her contribution. One Family continued by saying that the main findings of the report indicated that one parent families in all countries have among the highest risks of both material deprivation and income poverty. The point it is making is in terms of ordinary instruments to try to eradicate poverty, more has to be put into the areas of lone parents and disability. There have to be more of those instruments to deal with that.

I refer to what SPARK said because it is important. It said that in general, the situation for domestic abuse survivors had been sorted, that a few local offices were still ignoring it but, to be fair, once it highlighted it to Department officials it was resolved. It also said that there was a massive problem around people transferring from the one-parent family payment to JST, that shortly after the transfer, the liable relative got a letter stating the Department no longer held them liable for maintenance but that any existing court orders were still valid, that many men stopped paying and because, legally, the Department could not do anything, it put pressure on the lone parent to prove they were seeking it, that many lone parents did not have an address for their ex-partner so the courts would not issue a summons, that the Department had the father's PPS number and address yet it put pressure on the woman when she did not have that information and that people with young children aged seven to 13 were really being pressurised over this. That is an area that needs to be looked at in a critical way.

SPARK also said that a positive of the budget was the €10 per extra per week for qualifying lone parents, although that was still €17.60 less than it was back in 1971. That is going back a long time. It referred to the €5 extra in the basic payment and €2 extra for qualifying - small but welcome. It said that it failed to address higher costs of teenage children and left lone parents with teenagers in a very precarious position, that even with child benefit, €31.80 a week, did not adequately feed and clothe a young adult and that they are charged adult rates for most things and that it did not cover even basics such as schools costs, trips, transport, etc.

The other main point made was there was no provision made that would allow child maintenance be seen as a benefit for the child and that in general, 50% of a maintenance order is deducted from social welfare but it is 100% for people on rent supplement and that this happens whether the maintenance is paid or not. That point was made earlier on by a Deputy.

It was a positive report. Some positive things happened around the budget but lone parents are expecting a lot more and they will continue to campaign for what they think has to be done in respect of getting them out of poverty and deprivation.

See this speech in context