Michael Brennan (Progressive Democrats)

I acknowledge the points made about the role of women in the welfare system, the requirement to reform the pension system, the lone parent system and particularly child poverty. I also acknowledge the work of carers. We introduced a €1,000 respite grant to help make the jobs of carers easier and enable them to become more professionally involved, on which I have had a number of meetings with the Carers' Association. The Taoiseach, the Tánaiste and I recently met with the association and discussed many of these issues. I support the association's determination to have a national carers' strategy and promise to work with it on this.

I also acknowledge Senator Bradford's point that when there are 53 or 54 different schemes there are bound to be anomalies. Similarly when one spends €12.5 billion. Senator Bannon pointed out, as did other Senators such as Senator Norris, that if people move from one scheme to another they can lose out. They might have not enough stamps for one or the thresholds may be different for another. It can be a nightmare to negotiate one's way through. My responsibility is to remove those anomalies. We removed some last year and we will remove more in the period ahead. If suggestions made here today can be carried out we will do so but when there are rules people fall either side of them.

The system is there for the individual, not vice versa. It must be tailored to the needs of individuals because individuals do not think departmentally. They have needs, whether they be in the field of health, education or welfare and we must design our systems so that they can be tailored to meet the needs of the individual at the time, rather than a one size fits all hand down, whereby if people do not fit a particular size and shape of scheme they do not qualify. Clarity is important on the way forward.

On the motion itself, Irish society was based on the traditional family unit, which gave rise to the marriage bar. The bar was removed in 1973 but structures remained whereby women were largely dependent on their husbands from a financial point of view. This has had an effect on the number of women who qualify for pensions in their own right and successive Governments have sought to introduce greater flexibility in that area. In 2000 a special half-rate pension was introduced.

I will clarify entitlements under the homemakers' scheme. The scheme allows up to 20 years spent on caring duties to be disregarded when a person's insurance record is being averaged to assess entitlement for contributory pension purposes. This set of measures is of particular benefit to women who may have less than complete social insurance records due to working in the home. At present, approximately 87% of women over 65 years of age resident in Ireland receive social welfare support, either in their own right or as qualified adults. With improved social insurance coverage, easing of qualifying conditions and improved workforce participation more people, particularly women, will qualify for contributory payments in the future. Despite these improvements, there are some people who cannot qualify for a pension in their own right. In the motion Senator Terry has drawn attention to a number of those.

Qualified adult allowance rates are now 66% of the main rate and there is a commitment to raise it to 70%. Senator Terry's motion calls for it to be paid directly and brought up to the level of the contributory pension. She pointed out that it is in our programme for Government. I have costed it and it is extremely expensive but I support the idea of paying the qualified adult allowance directly to the person involved, which is usually the woman. It is possible to do that and 7% of new pension claimants have opted for the arrangement. The fact that it is not widely taken up suggests two conclusions. Either there is no demand for it or there is a demand but, given the nature of Irish society, that demand is not effective. I incline to the latter. There are a number of difficult issues to be resolved in deciding that it will not be paid to the man but in a separate cheque to the woman. However, I am attracted to the idea and will try to make progress.

A number of other issues were raised and with permission I will not go into them all in this debate. The script I have circulated deals with many of the issues raised in the motion. Perhaps the Senators would agree to take the contents of the script as part of my response. I wanted to make general personal comments and the script deals with the details of many of the issues which have arisen.