Policy | Impacts of Budget 2012 Still Felt Today

Five years ago today, on Tuesday 5 December 2011, former Ministers Joan Burton and Brendan Howlin rose in the Dáil to read out Budget 2012. None of us could have anticipated just how horrendous it would be for poor one-parent families, and how long-reaching the impacts of the cuts announced. There was no evidence of social policy planning behind the ‘reforms’ and the consequences have been that thousands more children have lived in higher levels of poverty and thousands of parents have lost jobs and incomes. Children living in one parent family households are almost twice as likely to live in poverty than other children; 23% of children in a one-parent family experience deprivation (SILC 2014).

Along with other organisations, One Family has successfully worked over the past five years to have some of these cuts reversed, but much of it was too little too late by Government. We summarised the negative impacts of consecutive Budgets for one-parent families in this document.

We now need to continue to work together to build a brighter future for all the children in Ireland living in one-parent families.