Paschal Mooney (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I wish the banking inquiry committee the best of luck in its endeavours. It is meeting for the first time this morning and I hope it will expedite matters, rather than drag them out, as appeared to be suggested, with a political agenda in mind.

In a month during which the Minister for Social Protection has been out on the hustings and reassuring Labour Party members that she has learned the lessons of the recent election debacle, in which the party's vote was decimated, that there will be no more austerity measures and that she will stand up for core Labour Party values in the Government, particularly in the budget, it is somewhat ironic that she has announced that she will take money from over 9,000 single parents who will lose their one-parent family payment, while next year it is intended that the payment will be taken from all families with children over seven years of age. I realise these measures have been in gestation for a couple of years and date from a couple of budgets ago. However, in the light of all that has happened and the recent verdict by the people on continuing austerity, it is extraordinary that the Minister is still pursuing her austerity line. It is affecting the most disadvantaged part of society, one that I would have thought the Labour Party would consider to be a natural constituency - lone single parents. The National Lone Parent Family Network claims that working single parents will be forced to give up work because of the cut. It states that when it is implemented, there will be a loss of €3,600 per year and that single parents would be better off not working. Despite the fact that the Minister's spokesperson-----