Ruairi Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the legislation. I commend the work done on this by Deputies Kerrane and Brady from my party. We all welcome the fact that child maintenance payments will no longer be assessed as means for social welfare and the discontinuation of the liable relative provision. It has been a problem for a long time. If we go through the entire social protection system we see a number of anomalies. People get caught in them. Sometimes we have really hammered down on those who have really needed support. We have probably created a pile of unintended consequences. I am very glad to see this will go.

Many of my colleagues, particularly Deputy Ó Laoghaire, have spoken about the need for a properly operating child maintenance service. We would all agree on anything that can be done about placing the onus of legal ramifications or financial burdens on single parents, who definitely have enough work to do in raising their child or children. We all know the difficulty of going through the court system. I ask that this issue be expedited. What we need to see is a sensible solution to the overall circumstances we have.

The idea of doing this is to deal with the issue of poverty. We know that single-parent families are often under severe pressures. This is probably a small enough intervention. We all know that a large number of families need intervention earlier than it happens to ensure the right of children to be all that they can be. Earlier we were dealing with further education and all of the new roadmaps with regard to apprenticeships, post-leaving certificate courses and degrees. Apprenticeships are no longer the traditional apprenticeships only. There is a large cohort of children and young adults who are well removed from this educational sphere. We have to do a far better job at an earlier stage. Many of these children come from disadvantaged communities. We definitely could make an intervention that would have an impact by empowering and facilitating families and ensuring we can bridge the gap and can allow people to get onto this route out of poverty.

The Minister and I have spoken many times about family carers and the fact we need to take a look at how we deal with this issue. I accept there are big differences between the supports provided to many family carers. We probably could not put a cost on some of them. We need to make sure people do not get caught in these anomalies either. A review of disability payments is ongoing. This involves another cohort of people who at times have fallen between stools. If we are speaking about dealing with poverty and facilitating all citizens to be what they can be, we need to look at these across the board. This is a good start but there is a lot more to do.

See this speech in context