Gerard Craughwell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

The Minister will be delighted to hear that I will not take eight minutes. She has been bamboozled this afternoon with statistics. While they are all extremely relevant I do not intend to take that route.

Any increase the Minister could achieve for lone parents was welcome. However, one aspect of our lone parent policy that bothers me is the talk about work incentive schemes. Being a lone parent has to be the toughest job in the country. Instead of trying to incentivise lone parents to go out and work we should be ensuring that they have some type of livelihood that makes it worthwhile to stay at home and rear their children. God knows, we hear enough about latchkey children. I am aware of one town in this country that is regarded as a latchkey town because so many of the parents are working. These are two-parent families. The children come home in the evening to nothing and nobody. That is no way to run a country. I have a difficulty, therefore, with the idea that we should be incentivising lone parents to go out to work. We should be incentivising them to rear their children, while those who wish to work should be incentivised to do so. Indeed, I know lone parents who are in very senior positions and who have managed to find the work-life balance whereby they are able to rear their children and work. They are to be congratulated. They are not all women. Some of them are men.

On the education and activation programmes, education is the key to everything. If one can educate oneself one can move forward. I will always be grateful to Limerick City Vocational Education Committee which gave me my second chance in education and brought me through to degree and postgraduate qualification. Otherwise, I would be living on a social welfare payment somewhere in east Limerick.Education is the way forward. Anything that can be done to help lone parents into the education system is to be commended. A number of excellent pilot programmes were run in Dublin some years ago which involved running the same module of a course three times a day. Lone parents were able to share the load of looking after children and taking up the opportunity to participate in education. I am delighted that one can apply to SUSI and hold on to the lone parent payment. That is excellent. I say, "Fair play," to the Minister in that regard.

Let us get away from talking about statistics. I am thinking of poor Mary Murphy or Julia Molloy or Tom O'Connor who is walking into the house this evening with his two or three children and nobody else. As my colleague said, when the door closes and one is walking the floors at 3 a.m. with a sick child, all the payments and statistics in the world mean absolutely nothing.

Two issues concern me. I am familiar with a widow whose husband died when the children were young. She worked hard all her life, paid PRSI and managed to keep a job going to educate her children who have now left. Unfortunately, she was a victim of the financial crisis and lost her job, but she is not allowed to draw any of the PRSI contributions that she herself made. There are two payments she is entitled to draw down, namely, her own social welfare payment, as well as her widow's pension. Her husband paid for the widow's pension, while she made her own PRSI payments. They should not be regarded as the one payment.

The other issue probably does not fall exactly within the Minister's remit, but she might bring it to the attention of the Cabinet. I have documentary evidence of one case and since I became aware of it I have become aware anecdotally of other cases. I refer to husbands who mortgage properties to the hilt and then walk out. In the particular case that was originally brought to my attention the man put the money in his pocket. He did not get it to pay off a debt; he walked away with €280,000 in his back pocket and left his wife and two children destitute. The banks about which we were talking this morning and in recent days went after her, not him, even though he had walked away with the money and is living a wonderful life. I know him. On the other hand, she is living on cornflakes once the children go to school in the morning. We have to do something about that situation where the fathers of this country walk away and leave their wives and children destitute. I know that it does not come directly under the care of the Minister, but it is something she might bring to the attention of the Cabinet as we must look at such issues.

I will not take any more time. I appreciate the Minister's attendance for this debate.