I will use my time today celebrating International Women's Day, to celebrate a specific group. That is single mums. We are actually closer to Single Parents Day, which falls on Saturday, 21 March, than we are to women's day, which was a couple of weeks ago. I realise there are also single dads. I put that on the record straight away but 85% of one-parent families are headed by women. The experience of one-parent families in Irish society is very much a women's issue. For my daughter's entire upbringing, I brought her up alone. We comprised one of those one-parent families. One-parent families are significantly worse-off than, if you like, traditional families in Irish society. They are statistically one of the groups in society most likely to experience poverty. Some 46.3% of one-parent families live in enforced deprivation, which is nearly three times the figure for two-parent families. Women in one-parent families are far more likely to have to take unpaid leave, move to part-time employment or leave the labour market due to a lack of affordable childcare. Focus Ireland recently found that 57% of homeless families in this country were one-parent families. Even though I would say we have moved on from what was a time of real stigma for one-parent families, I think we have lost the connection between the very dark history this country has in terms of the treatment of women who became pregnant outside of marriage and chose to raise children outside of marriage and our mother and baby homes and Magdalen laundries. I believe that has left a legacy in Ireland. Although the direct stigma is not as frequent, single-parent families and single mums are still seen as inferior. There is so much of value in being in a one-parent family that is never called out in Irish society. For example, a child in a one-parent family has a single line of authority, often something that can be better than a fractured two-parent family. They also have that unique bond, I believe, particularly where there is a single parent with one child. There are, therefore, ways in which I believe my family was a very positive place to bring up my daughter that I do not think are celebrated by Irish families. We still see that very traditional attitude that children should experience a mother and father in the home. Indeed, I remember my daughter being appalled during the marriage equality referendum at the posters that lined our streets saying every child deserved a mother and a father. Her father left Ireland when she was ten days old and never came back and never supported us as a family, so to say that to her really denied her her reality and it spoke to her as if our family was inferior. There are many fixes that would help one-parent families because they are structurally vulnerable. There are so many ways in which the structure of our society simply makes them vulnerable by default, but there are fixes that would help all of society and also help single parents disproportionately. A public model of childcare, social and affordable housing, collective bargaining and stronger workers' rights would all help single parents more than they would help other parts of the population because they are so structurally denied. Gingerbread is a one-parent service in Scotland and the rest of the UK that is supporting a single-parent family day this year by talking about the fact that single parents are superheroes. They are the ones who stick around. They are the resilient parent who manages despite all those structural disadvantages. Today, I wish to acknowledge the superheroes in Ireland who are single mums.

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