Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Deputy Murphy has made many of my points. We welcome the Bill. Single parents suffer disproportionately from poverty. That has been well documented and remained consistently the case for many years now. The fact that the amount of maintenance single parents might receive, the vast majority of whom are women, is means-tested and then impacts on their social welfare payments is completely unacceptable, when we have such a disproportionate level of poverty among lone parents. We very much welcome this long-overdue move to decouple maintenance from social welfare payments.

I also add, however, that even this improvement will still leave many lone parents in poverty because our basic rates of social welfare, whether it is the one-parent family payment or other social welfare payments, are below the poverty level. Significant numbers of our lone parents, including pensioners and other people who because of disability or other reasons, such as losing their jobs, are forced to live in poverty. It is our view that the basic social welfare and pension payments should increase to bring everybody at least above the poverty line. I do not see how in a society as wealthy as ours, one of the wealthiest in the world, that it can be justifiable to leave hundreds of thousands of people still living in poverty. I also take this opportunity to repeat the call of the disability community to add a premium payment. Our view is that everybody should be getting at least €300 a week in pension or social welfare payments to lift them out of poverty and people with disabilities should also get a premium payment above that. During the Covid crisis, with the €350 figure, we acknowledged that nobody could or should be expected to live on less than that. There is no reason to continue to leave so many people, many of them lone parents, languishing in poverty.

While we welcome the Bill and the decoupling of maintenance payments from social welfare, there is a hell of a lot more to do if we are to lift lone parents and many others in our society out of poverty.

3 o’clock

I will elaborate on a point because I noticed Deputy Durkan had a wry smile on his face when Deputy Murphy referred to the recent Oxfam report and the extraordinary levels of wealth concentrated in the hands of a tiny proportion of Irish society. Oxfam is only confirming what the Central Bank has confirmed. This is just in case Deputy Durkan is a little bit sceptical-----

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