Lone parents live apart ‘to claim payment’

LONE parents were accused of choosing not to live with their partners so they could claim social welfare and tax breaks by a cross-party group responsible for examining social and family policy.

The Oireachtas Committee on Social Protection published a report calling for laws doing away with the One Parent Family Allowance, which is paid to 88,000 people around the country, mostly single or widowed mothers.

It said this should be replaced by a new parental payment aimed at children living in poverty, regardless of whether their parents are living together or not.

Committee members said this would do away with “financial disincentives” to “family formation”, which was defined as marriage or cohabitation by both parents.

Fianna Fáil TD Thomas Byrne said the focus of the committee was on “protecting family life and encouraging family life”, because children from single-parent households were at a higher risk of poverty.

“At the moment there are serious disadvantages in the social welfare system to family life,” he said.

However, another member, Fine Gael’s Bernard Durkan, said the committee should be careful about accusing parents of “deliberately living apart” for financial reasons.

“We have to be absolutely certain that we do not punish people who might already be in a difficult or vulnerable position,” he said.

The committee admitted it did not have any research or evidence that couples are deliberately living apart to claim welfare, but members said they hear about it from their constituents, and on this basis have presented their recommendations to Social Protection Minister, Éamon O Cuív.

Mr Durkan, who is a newcomer on the committee and was not involved in writing the report, warned his colleagues that they could not “arbitrarily” send out the message that “if you do not live together you’ll be in trouble.”

A spokesperson for One Family, which supports single-parent families expressed concern that the committee’s report, Financial Disincentives to Marriage and Cohabitation, seemed to suggest that one-parent households were not families.

“One parent families are valid families and [the committee] have to be very careful with the language,” she said.

Labour’s Roisín Shortall said there was no intention to claim one-parent families are not valid in the report.

Ms Shortall said the aim was not to dictate that parents should live together, but to ensure the welfare and tax system was “neutral” to family choices instead of “providing a disincentive for particular family formations.”