Sarah O'Reilly (Aontú)

I welcome the Minister, Deputy Calleary. I welcome this legislation but it has flaws. I recognise the O'Meara family and thank FLAC, the Free Legal Advice Centres, for the briefing it provided to members of the social protection committee on this Bill. The Bill is welcome in that it makes the widow's pension inclusive of cohabiting couples who are not married or are in a civil partnership. However, the Government proposes to exclude people who are divorced or separated from entitlement to a widow's pension if their former partner dies. In this respect, parts of the legislation are regressive.

As the law currently stands, an individual may get the pension if the person he or she is divorced from dies, on condition that he or she has not remarried or is not cohabiting. This new proposal is wrong. In a family where the parents are divorced, maintenance payments will stop if a former spouse dies and the family and children will then become dependent on the widow's pension to avoid poverty. The Government is proposing to take this away from them.

Aontú also has questions regarding the burden of proof on all future applications, whereby individuals would have to prove they were in a committed and intimate relationship for at least two years before their partner died. Even married couples will be required to prove this under the legislation. I agree with Senator Craughwell that amendments will have to be made on the next Stage of the Bill.

The new requirements and the burden of proof in the legislation are an invasion of privacy for couples, even those who are married or in civil partnerships. How are they supposed to prove they were sleeping in the same bed? Will the Department ask people in the immediate aftermath of their soulmate's death to provide evidence of them being intimate? I am reminded of the famous quote that the State has no business in the bedrooms of the nation.

The Government is using the O'Meara judgment as a means of tightening the purse strings on this issue in the small print of this Bill. It is doing things in the legislation that the O'Meara judgment does not require it to do. I have a briefing document here in which FLAC refers to a significant concern that the Department does not seem to have conducted any human rights, equality or anti-poverty impact assessments of the proposals to reduce the social welfare entitlements of divorced and separated persons where their former partner dies. Given that children of lone parents are a cohort who are particularly vulnerable to poverty and homelessness, Aontú is calling for an impact assessment on this issue before we proceed with these provisions. They need to be debated properly and robustly.