In two brief lines in his budget speech in 1973, Richie Ryan introduced a novel social welfare benefit called the lone parent’s allowance. Unlike Noel Browne’s earlier mother and child scheme, this innovation was not denounced as heralding the end of the traditional family nor seen as a blow to the country’s cherished moral values. Instead, it passed under the outrage radar because, at the time, lone parents were rare creatures, numbering less than 3,000.
It was a relatively inexpensive measure that pressed all the right buttons in a state that had recently signed up to the common market and begun to look outwards towards European concepts of tolerance and inclusivity. Lone parents were a particularly vulnerable minority and the new allowance would afford them the economic safety net their circumstances required.
A little more than 30 years on, the number of lone parents in the country is heading for the 100,000 mark. And there is an increasingly compelling logic to the argument that, while it may have freed single parents from the poverty trap, the allowance has led to the sort of social chaos and decline of family values that even its most strident critics could never have foreseen.
According to Edward Walsh, a professor emeritus at Limerick University, the combined financial package on offer to single mothers amounts to a “substantial inducement for abuse”. As a result, he argues, an increasing number of children are growing up without a biological father in their lives, and without the care, guidance and love that previous generations enjoyed. In a speech to be delivered next Wednesday, Walsh points to a US survey, which found that 72% of murderers were raised by single mothers.
He is not alone in his strident views. Last month Ronnie O’Toole, an economist from Trinity College Dublin, argued that the benefit had worked to distort the choices available to young women from deprived areas who have always made up the bulk of its claimants. The “well-intentioned policy”, he suggested, had “warped the short-term prospects of a narrow stratum of society, offering them a fast track to an income and housing, on condition that they got pregnant without the support of a partner”.
It is indeed easy to see how the allowance, and the comparative independence it brings, could hold out beguiling prospects for underprivileged girls with little to look forward to. Having a baby, an income and the chance of a local-authority flat clearly confers a status on a poor 15-year-old that a mediocre Junior Cert and a checkout job in the local cut-price superstore hardly would.
Did the numbers of single mothers rise because the allowance was there? Or are the numbers claiming it increasing because single parenthood, in an era of unprecedented sexual licence, was inevitably rising anyway? It’s hard to know.
What we do know is that our national birth rate isn’t increasing by anything like the factor by which the number on the lone parent’s allowance has grown since 1974. Clearly, marital breakdown statistics must be considered in calculating the rise in lone parents claiming benefits, but the rise in single-parent pregnancies is undeniable. Almost one in three pregnancies in this country now occurs outside of marriage.
There is increasing support for the view that the lone parent’s allowance scheme, along with all the other benefits and concessions available, have had the effect of at best normalising, and at worst giving an incentive to, single parenthood. Walsh contends that a single mother of two children, in a position to claim all the allowances and benefits that may come her way, could rely on an income of up to €25,000 a year from the state.
On this point, though, there seems a slight contradiction in the arguments: if single mothers can potentially do so well out of the system, then how can they be trapped in corrosive poverty at the same time? If they have the chance of netting a tax-free €25,000 a year without having to work outside the home for it, how come their children are at increased risk of malnutrition, drug addiction and criminality? The answer seems to be that true poverty, of the kind that O’Toole argues is perpetuated by the allowance, is not solely financial. A life lived on benefits leads to an impoverished outlook, impoverished expectations and impoverished self-esteem. A single mother who forms a stable, long-term, cohabiting relationship with a partner — whether he is her children’s father or not — is putting her allowances at risk.
Extrapolating from British data on the same subject, O’Toole estimates that as many as 30,000 Irish children are being denied the influence of a stable male role model in their lives solely by their mothers’ economic obligation to remain single. Boys have a particular need for such an influence in their early years, and the alarming rise in suicide rates for young Irish men is unlikely to be entirely unconnected to the increasing number of young women raising children alone.
In prospect, the lone parent’s allowance must have all the appeal for an aimless teenage girl that Walsh suggests, but after a few years living with the reality on a tight budget the novelty probably wears thin. That’s when the real poverty of spirit and initiative begins to kick in, both for the mother and for her children.
Parenting is a full-time job that doesn’t always allow the time to cook healthy, nutritious and relatively low-cost foods, so parents in these situations rely more heavily on processed or ready-made meals. According to a British study published last week, attention deficit disorders and even conditions like autism can be linked to unhealthy diets.
It has been accepted for some time that we need to overhaul the way we deal with single parents. A few years ago Mary Harney, the tanaiste, considered offering incentives for single parents to live with their extended families so they could benefit from the available support system. She got roasted as a result.
It is a hot potato because of the political incorrectness of targeting unfortunate teenage mothers and their children. But tackling the dangerously misleading impression that single parenthood is a ticket to an easy life on benefits requires urgent and courageous action. Some economists argue that the allowance should be scrapped altogether although such a wide-reaching move would be difficult to implement.
It is perhaps obvious, but a hard-hitting educational campaign spelling out the realities of teenage parenthood, and the breadth of disadvantages for all concerned, has to precede any change to the relevant legislation. We have to shake off the fear of a backlash from feminist groups that will see any attempt to discourage single parenthood as a gross attack on female reproductive liberties and a return to the bad old days of the Magdalene laundries. But babies have rights, too, and the entitlement to be welcomed as a beloved addition to a stable family, and not conceived as a ticket to lifelong welfare benefits, ought to be among them.
