Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the people in the Gallery and I know many others are watching this debate at home. I thank the many women - they were mainly women - who contacted me to encourage us to push for this and to let me know that it means an enormous amount to them and that they want to see action.

For some time, Sinn Féin, in particular my colleague Deputy Brady, has been pushing the need for the State to establish a child maintenance agency. The current process requires lone parents to take their former partners to court to seek child maintenance payments. I know of countless lone parents, most often mothers, who have attended my clinics to get advice about how to get child maintenance payments from partners who have refused to contribute. When I tell them that their only recourse is through the courts I can see the fear in the faces.

It is not lost on them or me and, I am sure, it will not be lost on the Minister of State, that earlier today an apology was issued to women over how they were treated by the State. In the statements that followed, numerous contributors mentioned that women were dragged through the courts and how adversarial that process is. Collectively, we have agreed that the courts are not always the most appropriate place to go. Nobody wants to go through an adversarial process. Even when people are in the right, that prospect is very daunting.

In budget 2020, the Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Protection, Deputy Regina Doherty, announced funding to establish a judge-led group to determine, based on best international practice, maintenance guidelines and regulations which can hopefully be put on a statutory footing and which will achieve better outcomes for families. Guidelines are not good enough, not even guidelines that will, hopefully, be placed on a statutory footing. That does not give much hope, even though the word "hopefully" is used.

The motion calls on the Government to research best practice to find the best statutory child maintenance service model that we can establish here in consultation with key stakeholders. We need sensible workable proposals. Sinn Féin published these proposals in January 2018 and published a revised version this month showing Government exactly how a child maintenance service can be achieved.

We bring forward this motion with the full support of both lead lone-parent organisations in the State, One Family and SPARK. They have been very clear that they do not want guidelines; they want a statutory child maintenance service. It is time for the State to step up to the plate at long last and support lone parents.

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