Lynn Ruane (Independent)

I thank the Minister. It is also worth noting that in the next term, there will be a piece of legislation that has taken me five or six years to draft because it became so complicated and just kept getting bigger and bigger. It is the child maintenance legislation which would be placed within Revenue rather than an independent agency, which we have seen potentially would not work in terms of which Department would be responsible. We have spent five years developing it and it would actually the place the voluntary mechanism in terms of assessment within Revenue and we have interlinked how that interlinks with the courts, cases currently before the court, enforcement and taken at source, etc.

I would love the opportunity to engage on the child poverty measures because it could nearly be linked to people who went through the Revenue assessment tool as well. There is already a fair assessment of maintenance and you could nearly build on that. If you are part of that system and a parent dies and that money is taken directly from the family, there would already be a State system that has begun to assess. We took the tool from New Zealand and undertook a huge piece of research on the care cost percentage as well as the percentage of raising the child. There is the care cost and then there is the actual monetary cost. Those two are put into a mathematical tool which it is beyond me to fully explain right now. I would need to teach it to myself again every morning if I am going to speak to it.

There are some great measures within that Bill that would also be helpful to the discussion if we were ever to look at a social welfare intervention for those children. There are some mechanisms within that which could also be applied to another piece of social welfare legislation on child poverty. I would very much welcome the opportunity to engage with the officials who are working on that.