Maurice Cummins (Fine Gael)

I welcome the Minister to the House. I also welcome the discussion paper and the opportunity to address a number of the proposals it contains. The report is comprehensive on the welfare of lone parents and presents a review of the issues they face. As the Minister stated, research has identified the children of lone parents as one of the groups at major risk of child poverty.

It is essential that we review our social policies on the issue of lone parents, so they more accurately reflect our society today. We urgently need to find better and more up-to-date ways of tackling child poverty and removing barriers to training, education and employment for lone parents. Our social policies have made many people dependent on long-term welfare. Such dependence has ideologically been perceived by many theorists as a weakness of the welfare system, which often eliminates self reliance and initiative. Welfare provision has influenced living arrangements, increased dependency and kept people within the poverty trap.

Charles Murray's verdict on anti-poverty policy in the United States is a classic statement on the ineffectiveness of some welfare state policies. In Losing Ground published in 1984 he wrote:

We tried to provide more for the poor and produced more poor instead. We tried to remove the barriers to escape from poverty and inadvertently built a trap.

We are constantly told that the best route out of poverty is through employment. However, 60% of lone parents work in low-paid jobs and 15% are on incomes so low as to put them at risk of poverty. I believe the best route out of poverty is through education. Today, children leave primary school unable to read or write. More than 1,000 children do not even make the transition from primary to secondary school. Approximately 12% of those aged between 18 and 24 years left school early. We have an epidemic of young people with drug and drink addictions. These young people may be parents in the next ten years and the cycle will start all over again. Early Start programmes have not been expanded in more than ten years. The National Educational Welfare Board continues to be underfunded. That is where the commitment to tackle poverty should be.

Accessing education, training or employment has not been possible for many lone parents for a number of reasons. The most common reasons given include difficulty in finding affordable and accessible child care. The Minister has mentioned that this has been spoken of on many occasions in this House. Other reasons include lack of flexible or part-time working conditions. For example, most FÁS-run courses begin at 8.30 a.m., too early for lone parents. Another difficulty for lone parents is access to transport and time spent in commuting.

Putting the support services in place is the challenge for the Government and the Minister. It is also the challenge for employers and other agencies. What is needed is a co-ordination of services and the provision of resources to make that happen. I agree with the Minister in that this cannot happen overnight, and it may require a five or ten-year timeframe to put an effective implementation plan in place. We need creative thinking and I accept that not all families are the same. One size will not fit all in this area.

Lone parents include widows, separated and divorced people and teens living in urban and rural areas. Fathers made up 2% to 3% of lone parents in 2004. According to a policy document, Equality for All Families, to be published by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties today, unmarried couples, same-sex couples, lone parents and children experience serious inequalities and major difficulties because of the State's failure to recognise their relationships and families. It contends that the privileged position of the married family in the Constitution should be ended to prevent discrimination against unmarried couples and children. It is also calling for the removal of the ban on same-sex marriage and support for the introduction of a new optional partnership registration system for all couples.

In order to fulfil Ireland's obligations under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the ICCL report also calls for the guarantee of children's rights and a gender-neutral provision which would recognise the work of carers in the home to replace the current outdated reference to women's "domestic duties".

I want to express my concern about removing the right to stay at home after the youngest child in a family reaches eight years of age. Essentially, choice is being removed from poorer families. Having a stay-at-home parent will become the preserve of the well-off. Are we going to create a two-tier society? I have to question whether it is constitutional to compel parents to work. Bunreacht na hÉireann places a woman firmly in the home but gives special recognition to her role.

Updating to current policy, a woman can be prevented from taking up employment, participating in education or training or becoming politically involved because of the prevailing social policy which results in a lack of affordable, freely available child care. However, a new model is that women are now obliged to work, like their male counterparts, as citizen workers rather than citizen carers or mothers. We must be very careful in how we deal with this.

We must support parents by providing family-friendly work arrangements and good quality affordable child care facilities, including after-school care, elderly care, more training places and a decent joined up public transport system. The OECD noted in 2003 that the employment rates of lone parents in Ireland are low despite ten years of unprecedented employment growth. It made certain recommendations to encourage greater participation in the workforce. One of those recommendations was for the development of a system of mutual obligations between State and lone parents. Forcing parents out to work without the supporting infrastructure is not quite in keeping with the spirit of that recommendation.

The elimination of the cohabitation rule is to be welcomed. This was a degrading rule and actively discouraged family formations. Joint parenting must be supported. I welcome the recognition of the right of each individual to receive his or her social welfare entitlement independently, and the financial independence that this can provide. In effect, this will do away with the present qualified adult system, which is inequitable and discriminates against women. We see no reason that this could not be implemented in early course or immediately.

A number of organisations have expressed concerns about the practical implications of the proposed social welfare reforms. For example, the withdrawal of the parental allowance could create serious poverty traps unless significant reform of other elements of the social welfare and tax systems is implemented. These poverty traps are primarily the result of the re-application of the limitation rule when the parental allowance finishes and more stringent means assessment, which applies to unemployment payments.

Unless there is a comprehensive interdepartmental and interagency approach, properly planned and resourced, we will not succeed in combating the poverty being experienced by lone parents and their children. I do not have much confidence in this Government delivering the appropriate supports for parents in the coming years.

The 2001 NESF report on lone parents developed a series of recommendations on how training, education and employment programmes could be made more accessible to lone parents, focusing particularly on the courses and programmes that achieve high rates of progression into better-quality jobs. These offer opportunities for career development. Five years later, lone parents are still waiting for these recommendations to be acted upon. Furthermore, the research strand of the equality for women measure has described the challenges faced by working parents and the negative implications for the women involved and it has identified recommendations to address the issue. Most of these have not been implemented.

I welcome the public debate on these proposals and I hope it will compel action. Many of the proposals are not new and should be implemented immediately to create a positive impact on the lives of lone parents. We have no intention of making a political football of discussing these reforms. We will be involved in constructive debate at all times in this issue. We hope to see more action, rather than policies, at this stage.