Madam, - If I understand Dr Ronnie O'Toole's reasoning correctly (The Irish Times, December 27th), the lone parent allowance introduced by the Government in 1974 acted as a incentive to young Irish women to get themselves pregnant. "To young women's great detriment",says Dr O'Toole, "lone parent allowance was distorting their choices".
This conjures up a picture of a household in a less privileged part of the country in which a 15 or 16 year old is weighing up the pluses and minuses of a future which includes on the one hand further education and a job, and on the other hand the income and benefits to be gained as a single mother, and then opting for the latter. The upshot, according to Dr O'Toole, is that we now have nearly 80,000 lone parent families.
Dr O'Toole goes on to suggest that any solution must try to remove the perverse and unintended impact of lone parent allowance while ensuring that current recipients are not left destitute.
These sentiments are ones I would expect to find in a far right economic treatise on the problem and given Dr O'Toole's position with the Social and Statistical Inquiry Society of Ireland, I suspect that is a philosophical bed he would extremely reluctant to share.
Finally, how the payment of subsistence to 15-year-olds and over in specified areas would alleviate the lone parent problem in this country is beyond me. - Yours, etc.,
PAUL KAVANAGH, Domville Road, Templeogue, Dublin 6.