Willie O'Dea (Limerick City, Fianna Fail)
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312. To ask the Minister for Social Protection the cost in a full year of making the family income supplement payable with the jobseekers transitional payment to eligible persons; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [11609/16]

Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael)
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The jobseeker’s transitional payment (JST) is available to lone parents (both former one-parent family payment recipients and new lone parents), who have a youngest child aged 7 to 13 years inclusive. These customers are exempt from the jobseeker’s allowance conditions that require them to be available for, and genuinely seeking, full-time work.

While it is a condition of the JST scheme that recipients must continue to parent alone, this is not a qualifying condition of the family income supplement (FIS) and so this information is not maintained for FIS recipients. From the data currently available on household composition within the FIS scheme, it is not possible to determine which FIS recipients, who are also lone parents, would be eligible for JST, given the specific conditionality which applies to the JST scheme.