Mary White (Fianna Fail)

A total of 98% of recipients of one-parent family payment are women. I did a newsletter on the budget in which I said it was anti-women and anti-family. Two of the eight measures taken were regressive. For the Members who were not here earlier, I stated that on 30 November the CSO, in a survey on income and living conditions, indicated that people on higher incomes were earning five times more than those on lower incomes and that the risk of poverty was 15.8% compared with the previous year when it was 14.1%, the bottom line being that lone parent families are at greater risk of poverty than most other families. A person in a lone parent family is four and a half times more likely to live in poverty. I find it difficult to understand, in this partnership between the Labour Party and Fine Gael, how the Labour Party Ministers in Cabinet could support cutting the lone parent payment rate. It is incomprehensible. As I said earlier, a good kick in the shins of those men at the Cabinet table might have stopped these cuts. We have passed many laws that came before this House but because there are not an equal number of women and men making the decisions, much of it is not socially progressive.