Tomorrow, Saturday April 11, at 3pm People Before Profit Mayo has organised a public meeting in the Le Cheile Family resource centre, Tucker Street, Castlebar. The guest speaker at the event will be Michelle Frawley of the one-parent family group Spark. She will give a presentation on the cuts to one-parent family payments and the consequences for one-parent families, followed by a question and answer session.
Tom Moran of the People Before profit Alliance said: “There is one major problem with this, we have a 10 to 11 per cent unemployment rate, with figures massaged by Labour schemes such as JobBridge and Jobplus, so the real jobless figures are near 25 per cent. Therefore, someone coming into the work force would be lucky in the extreme to find employment.”
He continued: “With an extra 30,000 or so people competing for jobs it will be even more difficult to find work. This State already has atrocious levels of child poverty. The UNICEF report released in October of last year had one in four children living below the acceptable level of poverty. Barnardo’s puts a figure of 63 per cent of one parent families living in poverty, if these cuts are not reversed this figure is set to rise considerably.”
