Changes to allowances paid to lone parents are an opportunity to get more women into the workforce, Taoiseach Enda Kenny has said.
Parents’ groups have claimed recent changes to the one-parent family payment will negatively impact thousands of people on low incomes.
The Government says the move is aimed at enabling one-parent families to move out of welfare dependency, but campaigners say as many as one in three of the 30,000 lone parents who are working part-time will lose out.
The changes mean parents will no longer receive the one-parent payment once their child reaches seven years of age. They may supplement their income by accessing the family income supplement if they work 19 hours or more per week.
The Department of Social Protection has said the aim is not to force lone parents into employment but to provide them with assistance to prepare for work.
Mr Kenny said he was “not going to commit to anything” in relation to changes in next year’s budget, and that the Government would not go outside the limits it had already set for that.
Speaking on RTÉ’s Today with Seán O’Rourke programme, Mr Kenny said: “We need to be able to continue to create the opportunity and the facility for people to better themselves to ensure that work pays.”
Asked whether he would do anything for those parents affected by the changes, he said he was not going to commit to anything in relation to October’s budget. “The opportunity is there to get more women in particular back into the workforce.”
On Wednesday, Tánaiste and Minister for Social Protection Joan Burton said about 25,000 of the 30,000 people who may be affected by the changes had been interviewed so far in social welfare offices.
Of those, some 20,000 would see “absolutely no change at all because they are full-time homemakers with their children”.
The Tánaiste insisted the response so far from those the department had spoken to had been “very positive”.
“We are on standby to assist anybody who has any particular difficulty. We have also been talking to employers around the provision of extra hours, so I’m confident we can make this transformational shift to helping lone parents out of poverty.”
Spokesman for the single parents’ group Spark, Gregori Meakin, said the lack of affordable, quality childcare remained the major obstacle for parents to exit dependency on welfare. “Many lone parents simply cannot afford the childcare associated with working,” he said.
A recent report by EU finance ministers on euro zone governance recognised that the low work-intensity of lone parents in Ireland was compounded by limited and expensive childcare, Mr Meakin said.
“This is nothing new; every report by the Government assessing lone parent supports have pointed to childcare as the abiding issue.The failure of the Tánaiste’s policy is that the State did not address but instead tried to lay the responsibility with parents’ own action as the explanation of the low uptake of paid employment,” he said.
Mr Meakin said even this ignored the department’s own figures, which showed that 11,000 working parents had lost a significant percentage of their income. “Until childcare provision is addressed, these reforms should never have gone ahead in the form they did.”