Why force lone parents to make choices that are not available?

YOU will recognise the passage, won’t you? “The State … guarantees to protect the Family in its constitution and authority, as the necessary basis of social order and as indispensable to the welfare of the Nation and the State.

… In particular, the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved. … The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.”

It is of course part of Article 41 of our constitution, the part that refers to the importance of the family in Irish life. The bit about the role of mothers isn’t often quoted and a lot of people regard it as somewhat old-fashioned.

Some even see it as a bit demeaning to women, and there’s no doubt that in its time, it reflected a view that all too often said a woman’s place was in the kitchen.

It’s also true to say that you really can’t be sure any more what the constitution means, at least until the Supreme Court tells you what it means.

The sacred and central place of the family in the constitution hasn’t stopped the Supreme Court from telling the Government they can split up the families of immigrants, for example. So maybe we’ll have to wait until someone decides to test the constitution before we know whether the protection of mothers is as clear as it seems to lay people like you and me.

That test may not be long in coming. Last week it was revealed that the Government is considering the introduction of changes in the social security system that could end up moving thousands of lone parents from welfare to work by making it obligatory for them to seek employment or training.

According to the newspapers, the proposals include plans to allocate individual lone parents a trained welfare adviser from the Department of Social and Family Affairs to help them to access support for employment, education or training.

Social and Family Affairs Minister Martin Cullen was quoted in the reports I read as saying that the current welfare system for lone parents was flawed and that one-to-one support for single parents could achieve much better results for families. “The best way to deal with this is to deal with lone parents on a case-by-case basis, to examine their individual needs, whether that is childcare, issues to do with literacy or education, before getting them into different schemes or part-time work,” he told the papers. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve always believed that people who find themselves as lone parents should have a much wider range of options open to them. Lone parenting is a tough and lonely business largely (though by no means exclusively) reserved for women, and it is a recipe for poverty.

The vast majority of children in Ireland who live in consistent poverty, for example, live in lone parent families. The support that lone parents receive from the State has never been much of a barrier against poverty, and that support has always been accompanied by disincentives to work, or indeed to go back into education.

So anything that sets out to address those disincentives, or to widen the range of options open to lone parents, can only be welcome.

There is a fairly widespread belief in Ireland that a lot of young women particularly choose lone parenting, that they see it as an easy way out of living at home or of forcing the local authorities to give them their own accommodation. I have yet to meet anyone who has made that choice, or who thinks that lone parenting is a bed of roses.

But I’ve already heard one commentator on the radio saying it was totally unacceptable that the taxpayer should be subsidising “the breeding habits” of young women. He was adamant that any scheme aimed at enabling lone parents to go back to work must be made compulsory, which would mean that parents who didn’t avail of the scheme would be cut off from all support.

And the media reports of the Government’s intention also seemed to imply that compulsion was under consideration, although no decision had yet been made. It was reported, for instance, that “Government officials are understood to be alarmed at the cost of the lone parents’ allowance” (which costs about €830 million a year, together with a further €200m in other supports).

That sounds like a lot of money, I know, especially to those who think everyone else is ripping off “their” taxpayer’s money. In fact it represents in total about 5% of the social welfare budget and an even tinier fraction of the total collected from taxpayers each year.

Mind you, every time I hear this argument about taxpayers’ money going to subsidise other people, I nearly get sick There isn’t a single citizen in Ireland who isn’t “subsidised” in one way or another by the taxpayers.

Not even right-wing commentators pay the full economic cost of their children’s education, or their own healthcare. You can actually meet some of the right-wing commentators travelling into work every day on the heavily-subsidised DART from some of the more affluent suburbs on the south side of Dublin. But it seems to be a rule of life that it’s OK to give out yards about the subsidies paid to other people, but never to mention the thousands you get in subsidies yourself.

Anyway, to get back to the point. It may be purely a coincidence (I hope it is) that the intention to reform lone parents’ support was floated in the same week that the Government once again announced that it had hopelessly miscalculated its overall tax revenue.

REFORM of lone parents’ support, in an era of belt-tightening for those without powerful lobbies to represent them, could well mean compulsion.

The way it would work, apparently, would be that lone parents would be supported in the raising of their children until the child had reached a certain age, and then they would be forced to choose a course or a training programme that would get them back to work.

But thousands of lone parents would make that choice right now, on an entirely voluntary basis, if the courses were available and accessible, if second chance education was welcoming, if decent childcare facilities were affordable, if jobs could be found that didn’t discriminate against their life circumstances.

None of those circumstances exists today. If you forced lone parents into choices right now, you could only be forcing them into making their living conditions, and those of their children, worse. If we want to help lone parents out of the poverty traps in which too many of them live, we have to invest in building up the range of choices first — and especially, we have to invest in proper childcare facilities.

If we decide to put the cart before the horse, and force lone parents into making choices that don’t exist, we’ll just end up turning another section our population into second-class citizens.

Haven’t we done enough of that already?