OPINION/Miriam Donohue Mary Jones lives in a comfortable four-bedroomed detached house in a leafy suburb in south Dublin. She has three children, aged between seven and 13. Her eldest has just started secondary school (fee-paying) and her youngest will make her Holy Communion next June. An expensive year lies ahead.
Mary works fulltime in the home. She gave up her job as a personal assistant to a company manager to spend more time with her children. Her husband Joe is a sales manager and earns €80,000 a year. He also gets an annual bonus and drives a company car. Life is good for the Joneses.
Every month €382.50 in child benefit is lodged into the Joneses' bank account by the Department of Community and Family Affairs. Some of the money is transferred into an education account for the Joneses' children. The balance goes into one of the Government's new Special Savings Incentive schemes that will yield one euro for every four they save over the next five years.
Switch to the Smith family, who live in a council estate in Dublin. Anne Smith's husband is unemployed and she works as a part-time cleaner to help make ends meet. They, too, have three children - one in the local community school and two in primary.
Life isn't easy for the Smiths.
On the first Tuesday of every month, Anne Smith joins a long queue of mothers at the local post office to collect her €382.50 in child benefit. It isn't lodged into a bank account, as she doesn't have one. Anne is never a day late collecting the cash, and it is always accounted for before she gets it into her hand. The money goes to pay overdue electricity, fuel and food bills.
These are fictitious people, but the scenario outlined is typical. It doesn't matter whether you are Mrs Ronan Keating, Mrs Mary McAleese, Mrs Mary Jones or Mrs Anne Smith. For everyone in this country, child benefit is the same.
I get €235.20 a month in child benefit for my two children. Of course it is nice to have it. But it is inequitable that middle and upper income earners get the same State payment for children as families who hardly have enough to live on from day to day.
This week, it emerged that the Government's tax strategy committee is currently assessing the pros and cons of taxing child benefit as part of its pre-Budget homework.
The mere mention of the issue brought the usual hullabaloo from women's organisations, anti- poverty groups and the Opposition. Privately, Government backbenchers, sensing that such a move would go down like a lead balloon with middle-class voters, were squirming at the very thought.
Remember there was the same outcry in the 1980s when the Fine Gael-Labour government, and subsequently Albert Reynolds, as Minister for Finance, threatened to tax child benefit? Nothing happened in either case because of the storm of protest that followed the floating of the idea. But times have changed dramatically since then. The economy has been booming, and child benefit payments have risen dramatically since the FF/PD Government came into office in 1997.
In 1997 the total annual spend on child benefit was €504 million. Last year that figure had jumped to €660 million, and doubled this year to €1.44 billion. Every month the State gives €117.60 for the first two children and €147.30 for the third and subsequent child.
The Minister for Finance, who is in a major financial pickle at the moment, may be getting excited about the possibility of clawing some money back into the State coffers by taxing child benefit.
But let's shout No here, Minister. If you do decide to do the right thing, and tax child benefit, the millions you save should not be diverted into other areas. You must ensure the same amount stays in the child benefit pot.
Instead of dividing the money equally among all the State's mothers, it should be heavily weighted in favour of those who need it most by taxing it at the top level, and increasing the basic payment for the less well off and the poor.
Maybe several millions could be held back to develop childcare facilities in socially disadvantaged areas so mothers could be encouraged to return to work.
I have heard opponents of such a move say that because childcare costs are so high, few families actually fall into the category of not needing child benefit. It has also been argued that in many families, child benefit is the only money that housewives get directly into their hands.
I accept this may be the case, and that thousands of families would be on the border line between having child benefit taxed or not.
However, these arguments do not stand up against the sheer unfairness of the current system. And we are not going to get a taxed child benefit formula that will be acceptable to everyone.
The Economic and Social Research Institute has calculated that more than €100 million of the Government's increase in child benefit between 2001 and 2003 will go to the top one-fifth of income earners in this country.
The case for taxing child benefit is surely reinforced by this statistic, and by the fact that many well-off families are investing their monthly payment straight into the Special Savings Incentive Accounts. They are getting a double bonus courtesy of the State. It will take a brave Minister for Finance to bite the bullet and do the right thing. Let's see if you are up to it, Mr McCreevy.