WAKEY, wakey all you single parents out there! It’s July 2 and it’s the dawn of a new era for you, about 29,999 other mammies, and a few dads too.
No more will you wallow in idleness while your slack-jawed seven-year-old sits around losing what IQ he has. No longer will your welfare payment be “passive in nature”, to quote minister of state at Department of Social Protection Kevin Humphreys, speaking in the Dáil.
Not a bit of it! Your Taoiseach has reached down deep in his pocket and has come up with an “incentive” to work. The incentive is the back to work family dividend (BWFD — it just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?), €29.80 a week per “qualified” child for the first year after you sign off your welfare payments, €14.90 a week in the second year, and nothing at all after that.
If you’ve already “transitioned” off the single family payment, sorry, but the BWFD is not for you because there are no retrospective payments. You can access the family income supplement (FIS) as can all lone parents on low wages who work more than 19 hours a week but the FIS only makes up 60% of the losses you suffer from leaving the single family payment and you’re still facing a 40% income drop.
Even if you have both of Enda’s carrots, the FIS and the BWFD, the lobby group Spark (Single Parents Acting for the Rights of Kids) reckons a lone parent with one child working 20 hours on the minimum wage will lose 11% of their income this year, 14% next year, and 18% in 2017. A lone parent with one child on the minimum wage working 35 hours a week still loses but loses less: 5% this year to 11% in 2017.
Am I after confusing you? You thought welfare payments were there to help people who needed them? So people who work less get more, right?
Wrong, wrong, wrong! The problem we are tackling here is not poverty, it is the moral turpitude of girls who go out and get themselves pregnant and then expect the State to pick up the tab! This is bad for you and bad for your children! So we are banishing you from the single family payment when your youngest child turns seven and punishing you if you don’t find enough work outside the home.
You have to learn that raising a child is not a job — unless you are caring for someone else’s child and paying tax, in which case it is a job. We all know young children turn into vegetables if they’re not put out of their own homes!
But raising your own child can’t be a job because we can’t see you working and we can’t measure the results you’re achieving. So we reckon you’re sitting around smoking, pouring vodka into your coffee. It’s not that we begrudge you the money, it’s just we worry about the children you’re rearing.
Some 23% of you are living in consistent poverty. Lone parents have a poverty rate which is 230% higher than that in the general population and 33% higher than that of the unemployed.
You may ask why we’re tackling poverty by making you poorer, but if you work over 19 hours a week you’ll only lose 11% of your income! That’s not bad, is it?
And what’s all this nonsense about not being able to find a part-time job? Veronica Scanlan from the Department of Social Protection wrote recently that working the required hours “should be possible for most given their children will be at school”.
Where will lone parents find a job for 19 hours a week which exactly fit the 20 hours or so which some seven-year-olds are in school? A job you can dump for the six months of the year which school is not on? Can you think of that job?
I can only come up with self-employment options, from taxi driver to call girl, and I guess you wouldn’t make much money at either of those if you only worked from 9am to 1pm.
But if you did any of those jobs you wouldn’t qualify anyway. Because here’s the funny part: You’re not entitled to family income supplement if you’re self-employed.
Why? Well, can’t be sure you’re working the hours, can we? We want every Irish mother to punch in and out of a proper job, no matter what age her child is and no matter what their needs are. We have been consistent in this since we took power.
In 2012, we cut the pension entitlements of women who had spent a good part of their lives working in the home because — as Joan Burton explained to the Dáil — “those who pay more benefit more”. The same year, we cut the respite grant paid to the carers of seriously disabled by more than 20%.
Now the recovery has taken hold, there is talk of restoring public sector wages and cutting taxes to make sure the benefits go to tax-paying workers, not carers.
Feeling the heat from 30,000 who lose their single family payment today, Joan Burton is spinning a €5 increase in child benefit, but she reveals her agenda when she makes the point that “it applies equally to people in and out of work, so it doesn’t impact on the attractiveness of work”.
She doesn’t go as far as the OECD, which came to Ireland a decade ago and suggested withholding child benefit from mothers who weren’t working outside the home. But that is the thrust of the turbo-capitalist model the Government is following.
Michael Noonan’s department fears a labour shortage in specialist areas and is trying to come up with ways to get women out to work.
“The minister’s approach,” according to a spokesperson, “is that we should expand capacity, not accept we are at full capacity.”
Is “expanding capacity” the extent of our vision for this society? Even if it means a needy seven-year-old standing at the school-gate desperately looking for his one and only parent who can’t get out of work early enough to be on time?
Sorry, but, from today, the breaking hearts of seven-year-olds don’t matter any more. We can’t make the care a parent give a child look like economic growth so we’re binning it.
We’re binning all that nonsense Frank Cluskey talked about when he introduced supports for unmarried mothers in the early 1970s.
From today onwards , caring for children in your own home is officially proscribed as an activity for able adults. Wakey, wakey, lone parents! Welcome to the care-free world!
Victoria White
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