The transition from One Parent Family Payment onto Job Seekers Transition Payment will see more than 30,000 parents lose one parent family payments.

The government said the cut will give single parents an “incentive to take on more paid work”.

However…

A lone parent writes:

In 2005, I made the transition from a dignified state of independent human existence, into the precarious grace of living as someone society categorises as ‘disadvantaged’. My ears have been burning since.

At the height of the economic boom, while I was struggling to pay ever-increasing rents, and to put food on the table, people my age were earning six figures, going on three holidays a year, getting decking, buying a jeep, and complaining about having to pay for ‘those single mothers’.

They resented their taxes supporting women who, as they saw it, were promiscuous and irresponsible, and should not receive any kind of state support. When I pointed out that they were talking about my situation, they got embarrassed. They didn’t mean ‘people like me’. Except they did. They were talking about me, and it hurt.

The Mother and Child Act (1958) began the process of extricating women from the powerless and subjugated position which Church and State had placed them in. However, the stigma around parental responsibilities and the rights of women in this country still remains, and we have a very long way to go until full gender equality is achieved.

In 2015, in my own country, I am being discussed as if I were a stubborn type of weed, a problem to be frowned at. I have been utterly dehumanised by my government. My Minister for Finance tells me I am ‘allergic to work’. My Minister for Social Protection wishes to punish me, to ‘activate’ me – as if I am unwilling to make, or incapable of making, adult decisions regarding my own finances and family.

I wish to assert my rights; as a human being, as an Irish citizen, and as a parent, under the Constitution of our State. This position, this disadvantage, is a social construct which could easily be remedied. If Irish society were just slightly altered, there would be no such thing as ‘single mothers’, ‘single parents’, ‘lone parents’ – there would just be parents.

I could talk about the mixed messages our culture sends our young people: preaching abstinence in school, then selling hyper-sexualised femininine identities for the girls, and aggressive misogynistic machismo stereotypes for the boys.

I could talk about the utter lack of useful health education provided to our young people: the rudderless way we ignore their confusion and cover their experiences in shame. How we close down the conversations we should be having; conversations about self-esteem, emotional health, consent.

Conversations about contraception, STDs, HIV, and pregnancy. They are all part of the picture: confused young people with patchy and inadequate knowledge of their own bodies, and how to keep them healthy. Young people who are almost completely ignorant around conception and contraception. Some of these people will slip and fall into this ignoble category, becoming ‘single parents’.

I could talk about the ‘a’ word. If I mention it, will I have to wear it, a modern Hester? Because, when these young people (who are not in control of or educated about their own sexual health and family planning options) fall pregnant, they are left with abortion or adoption as their options. Both are extremely difficult and painful decisions, which can carry lifelong repercussions. Guilt. Fear. Shame. Blame.

The Church condemns abortion, and our secular State bans it. So, the two medical options which allow adults to decide when to have children, and how many they would like to have, are severely restricted in our modern Ireland. This is down to Church interference in education and legislation, which should have absolutely no place in a secular society. This is the first way we have been let down by the State: by allowing our young people to be kept in ignorance, and denied bodily autonomy.

This assumes one path to single parenthood. Young irresponsible girls ‘getting knocked up so they can get the council flat’. This is the stereotype, the ugly image, which our own government is using against us (Yet even in this, the role of the State is diguised, and the victims of archaic policies are made into the villains).

There are many ways to become a single parent. Bereavement. Divorce. Abandonment. Because we’re the irresponsible ones? The ones who stay, and raise our children alone. The ones who give up every hobby, social outlet, miniscule personal expenditure; because everything we have, every minute of every day, goes towards raising our kids. We are the irresponsible ones?

The people who abandon; the people who refuse to pay maintenance for their kids; the people who cannot by law be forced to spend one minute with their children; not all of them are men, but not one of them is forced by the State to be responsible, to contribute, and to share in their childrens’ lives and needs.

They can abdicate, refuse to visit, refuse to contribute, stand their kids up on visitation days, forget birthdays, miss every school meeting, and still not be judged or stereotyped, like the people they leave behind to raise children alone.

There are a growing number of fathers’ rights groups, and tied to this are fathers’ responsibilities. Neither is addressed under existing legislation. If a married man abandons his children, the Courts will try to enforce a maintenance agreement; but these hinge on tying access to their children with paying for their upkeep.

If a man doesn’t care about either, it is very difficult to pursue. For unmarried couples, this situation is even more difficult. Under existing legislation, if a parent refuses to look after their children, the law is pretty much powerless to make them.

Yet the ones who remain, who pick up the slack, who pull double duty, are the ones who get branded with an ugly stereotype.

If a partner dies, the entire cost of the funeral arrangements falls to the widow or widower, since the abolition of the bereavement grant. After the upheaval, they can fall upon the tender mercies of the Department of Social Protection. Which, after an impressive acreage of paperwork, may provide two years of One Parent Family Payment. For everyone except the previously self-employed, or whose spouses were previously self-employed.

[Former Minister for Education] Ruairí Quinn lied through his teeth, and then closed the doors of the colleges to low-income families. So, on a subsistence income, where do ‘lone parents’ find the money for CAO fees, registration fees, administration fees?

Since the grants have been cancelled, how are they meant to pay for books, printing, transport, childcare? This avenue out of destitution has been absolutely closed. JobBridge has annihilated low-income jobs, which had been a useful source of job-sharing or part-time work.

These positions are now endless unpaid internships, with no guarantee of a job at the end. The two most useful routes out of welfare dependency: a college degree or a foot-in-the-door job; have been effectively destroyed by this government.

These are the realities behind the nasty stereotypes and the manipulated statistics.’Lone parents’ do not just spring from the earth, created. They are the people left behind after bereavement or abandonment. They are the ones who decide to keep and love their children. They are the ones who remain. They carry the responsibility of holding a family together- of providing for the emotional, educational, spiritual and material needs of their children.

They forego a social life, their own needs, their health. They cope with this unending pressure alone, and they don’t complain. Maybe this is the problem. Maybe it’s the lingering dread, some scar on the psyche; of the mother and baby homes, of industrial schools and orphanages.

Perhaps, in the unspoken terror and guilt of not being good enough, or not being able to provide the same quality of life as two parents would, of surviving, of having picked the wrong partner; perhaps there is a deep subconscious dread that someone could just walk through the door and take your children from you. Because up until relatively recently, they could. Maybe that’s why ‘lone parents’ don’t complain. Or maybe they love their kids too much to ever want to make them feel like a burden.

However, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. While corporations, high earners, and the so-called ‘squeezed middle’ classes complain vigourously, and are rewarded with tax cuts and wage increases, the most vulnerable families in Ireland, already at twice the risk of poverty, are being hammered by new cuts to their (already meagre) incomes, every year.

Worse still, these cuts are being justified by an absolutely poisonous discourse, whereby the mediated social perception of ‘lone parents’ has become a despicable set of stereotypes and soundbites. The vocabulary of another era has crept in, and a tone of morality and the need for punishment underlies the political maneovures. As a member of this sub-human caste of unclean and immoral people, this (collective noun) ‘scourge’ of single parents, I can say that this is the second way I am being let down by my State.

My government has taken my sovereign position as a mother, under the Constitution, and they have degraded it. My parenting is not as good as other people’s parenting. My choices are not as valid. I have been living with poverty for a long time. We’re old friends. I can budget, scrimp, manage. The Celtic Tiger never roared for me, so these cost-cutting things other people are only learning to do now, I have been doing for ten years. Every year, there’s less to budget with, and it doesn’t do as much.

‘Lone parents’ in Ireland can be wholly vilified, because the rationale and stigma imposed by Catholic morality onto young unmarried women has been transmogrified into a class issue.

Only Joan Burton’s Labour party could resurrect this stigma, use it as justification to support punitive economic sanctions, and then claim to be trying to help anybody. A Labour Minister for Social Protection making these kinds of sweeping dismissive judgements, denouncing an entire section of people as a useless sub-class, is an extremely dangerous and worrying development.

Who will be next? Is everyone in poverty to blame for their own poverty? Why are the media not screaming about the way this attitude is heading, and the implications for how this government approaches social justice?

The reality is that ‘lone parents’ come from all kinds of economic backgrounds, come from all sorts of situations, and want to try to do their best for their children, just like any other parents.

Parent’s rights groups, St Vincent de Paul, and other agencies dealing with issues around human rights, children’s rights and poverty, have all denounced these cuts as unconscionable, and have warned of the catastrophic consequences. The Government refuses to listen.

So, ‘lone parents’ must be forcibly ‘activated’. This implies that, despite running a household and raising children alone, they are too lazy or inept to actually cope with making adult decisions, and they require these decisions to be made for them, by forcible interference.

This is the attitude of colony; of a dominant group enforcing rule over a vulnerable group, whose capacity to make decisions for themselves is denied, diminished and removed. ‘Lone parents’ cook, clean, do the laundry. They do the school run, remember every appointment and birthday, facilitate their kids’ social lives and sports fixtures. They love, explain, console, feed, comfort, calm,teach and worry. Alone.

As these families transition from One Parent Family Payment onto Job Seekers Transition Payment today they are facing hostile misrepresentation from a Department of Social Protection which appears to be encouraging the public to despise them.

JSTP is a much more precarious payment than OPFP. The list of conditions and requirements is virtually endless. Among them is a proviso that lone parents must set up and adhere to an ‘activation plan’.

This attaches specific conditions – attending courses, taking up training etc. – to their payment. Failure to comply results in a ‘penalty payment’. €44 will be taken off their JST payment.

So, a Department of Social Protection which has actively created a negative and damaging image of one parent families can now decide, based on a set of unfixed arbitrary conditions, to take money away from a family already subsisting on the absolute essential minimum it has been deemed possible to survive on.

This system is frighteningly open to abuse, and correcting mistakes could mean low income families getting further and further into debt, as it could take months to get to talk to superior officers or make appeals, to have claims reinstated. This is assuming that appeals officers would believe the word of a ‘lone parent’, given the abhorrent stereotype which has been created. This is an unacceptable position to put anyone into.

It is in the interests of everyone in Ireland to provide adequate and affordable childcare for all families. Those who don’t have children will be subsidised in their old age (in terms of healthcare, pensions, and supports), by this generation. We are an interdependent society. There is nothing preventing every school in Ireland offering after-school care. In France, everyone can access childcare until 6pm, daily.

A garderie, run by the schools, supports parents in working, for a nominal contribution of between €4-€8 every day. This is State-subsidised, and exists in every school. The ‘Scandinavian childcare model’ is the oft-repeated, much-touted, still-competely-absent reference point for this government.The challenge to having a ‘Scandinavian childcare model’ is the argument that this would require Scandinavian tax rates.

This argument shuts down the need to improve conditions and services. What this fails to include in the discourse is the fact that universal childcare is a reality in many countries. The tax increase argument is a complete and utter fallacy. We already pay more tax than the French, and we do not enjoy the same level of support for families and children.

Every day, I have to get up and read about myself, as my life is bandied about in the media, and I am rubbished as a worthless person in need of punishment, by my own government. I have a Masters degree. I apply for jobs every day, I send CVs, I do courses. My child means everything to me, and I try to be the best parent I can be. I would love to work, and have done everything I can to secure employment. I volunteer in my community, I try to stay positive. I am not the exception, I am the rule. Most single parents I know are exactly like me.

This government is selling a lie in the media; is selling an image of my life which is totally untrue. I have never complained about being poor. I have never complained about parenting alone. I love my child. We are a happy family. What I cannot tolerate is being told that I am a lazy sub-human who chooses poverty; a bone-idle blight on the economy, who must be aggressively bullied into employment I would otherwise not seek.

I am a parent, like any other parent. Why, with the prefix of ‘lone’, can I be utterly dehumanised, and stripped of my right to some kind of human dignity?

These cuts are utterly pointless. Once the costs of processing claims, sending out information, holding meetings, wasting oxygen in Dáil Éireann refusing to answer questions, etc. are added; when the actual negligible savings are pitted against the horrific impact, I doubt they will add up.

I won’t sit quietly by and let this happen. I want to be able to tell my child when they grow up, that I stood up for myself, and for other parents like me.

This government promised that these cuts were about improving the lives of families, and would not go ahead until adequate childcare was in place. That was a lie. Are we going to leave unsupervised seven year olds at home alone – all day, during the school holidays? Are we going to force them to make their own way home, unsupervised, through strangers and traffic? Some seven year olds are very mature.

However, I would not feel comfortable leaving any seven year old alone, while I worked an eight-hour shift. This age cut-off point is not about helping families or children: it is a purely arbitrary figure, pulled out of the air. It sounds like it might be based in some kind of logic.

The truth is, there is no law governing how old a child has to be before they can be left unsupervised: but regularly leaving a child under 14 alone can result in intervention by social services, who will assess the child’s maturity, whether they are neglected, and the likelihood of harm coming to them.

The Department of Children and Youth affairs will have to communicate closely with the Department of Social Welfare, to assess whether these children are suffering from real deliberate neglect, or just the consequences of government policies.

This is cold reality. Joan Burton’s policies will impoverish families, and endanger children. Not spin, not optics, not another political party, trying to score points. Just an ordinary parent, an Irish citizen, who cannot understand how the stroke of a pen has led to my ending up as somehow subhuman.

This is not reform. This policy needs to be abandoned, until affordable childcare is a reality for every parent in Ireland, and we can all work the full-time jobs we desperately want, with peace of mind that our children are safe and cared for. In the meantime,

I would ask the Minister to stop speaking for me, stop claiming to be acting in my best interests as if she knows better than I do what they are, and to actually listen to the people she is paid to represent.

(Photocall Ireland)