SEAMUS BRENNAN is calling time on single fathers who don’t support their children. The social welfare minister has ordered a review of lone-parent payments and the recovery of child maintenance.

Brennan is expected to beef up the maintenance recovery unit of his department and will travel to Britain this week to meet executives of the Child Support Agency to examine how it targets “deadbeat dads”.

Despite a legal obligation on all fathers to contribute to the costs of child-rearing, when they have the means to do so, compliance rates are as low as 15% in Ireland.

The minister is planning a “carrot and stick” approach, allowing fathers to contribute more cash to single mothers without their welfare payments being affected.

He says it is important psychologically for a young man to make a contribution to the rearing of his own child, even if he does not have a continuing relationship with the mother. “These young fellas will regret it in years to come if they don’t pay a few bob for their kids,” he said. “I would just appeal to any lad who has become a father that if you do this now, you’ll be able to look your son or daughter in the eye in 10 or 20 years’ time and say, ‘I did my bit when you were young and gave up what I could so you could have the things you needed’.”

Lone parents’ advocates say that hounding deadbeat dads only exacerbates poor relations between former partners and leads to increased resistance to paying maintenance.

“Fathers are willing to give, but not if they are coerced,” said Liam O Gogain, the founder of Parental Equality. “If it is only about money, it will be an abysmal failure. The mechanism of coercion is inevitably going to fail, as it did in Britain, and will lead to an eternal war of attrition between parents. We don’t need a child support agency. We need a shared parenting agency that rises to the challenge of supporting men who are actively engaged with their children.”

The state pays €700m a year in lone-parents’ payments to 80,000 people and another €100m in rent allowance to single parents. Less than 1,800 dads paid cash into the department last year to cover their obligations, while another 7,000 fathers paid cash directly to the mothers.

These figures do not include fathers whose payments don’t affect the mother’s maximum lone parent’s entitlement. Some fathers also pay cash privately to the mother without declaring it to the government.

Brennan said the review could mean a large increase in the number of fathers brought to court. The state has taken court action against just 150 fathers in the past three years in search of payment. The majority — about 100 men — agreed payment arrangements with the department before the court hearings went ahead.

Brennan hopes to get a fuller picture of who pays and who doesn’t by drafting looser rules on how much support a father can give before welfare payments are stopped.

Legal advice to government suggests the department would have no authority to “attach” an individual’s earnings, as the CSA does in Britain, effectively taking a child maintenance payment out of a father’s wage packet at source.

Teenage and twentysomething mums do not immediately lose any of their lone-parents’ payments when the child’s father makes a contribution. Mothers can get €96 a week from their child’s father without losing any of their welfare entitlement. Only half of any payment after that is taken off the lone parents’ allowance. The basic allowance now stands at €168 a week.

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