Very stingy? - maybe if that person has is single and got a good job. Not for people who have a wife and kids to support aswell. There's all different circumstances. Father's should be allowed pay what they can ( and i mean genuinely pay what they can)- money should not be the issue - a stable and loving relationship should be.
Fathers have no rights - it's ridicolous!
Fair comment. Effectively its a vicious circle - unmarried fathers are technically expected to pay for their children, but have no rights regardless of whether they pay up or not. From what I can see over the last 20 years, a very large percentage don't care anyway as they don't want the responsibilities anyway. I know a girl and her 1 year old child who was recently abandoned by her boyfriend who was contributing not a single penny despite having a decent job because he decided she was "too fat." (She's about a size 10 by the way). Scumbags like him should be held account for their responsiblities, and the best way is to hit them where it hurts, right in their wallets.
Having said that, it is very difficult to get unmarried (and sometimes even married) fathers to pay up because this being litigous Ireland, they can and will in many cases challenge everything.
The reason the UK system failed is not because they were implementing what I suggested, but because it became so bogged down in the complexities of every case. This is why i suggest that the absent parent be taxed at a flat rate on all income including social welfare. (And we do forget that about 10% of absent parents are women!) The uk system tried to assess people on their individual means and also had to deal with people moving around. But if you are claiming or down as liable for a permanent kind of tax benefit such as rent relief for example, you automatically keep getting it until otherwise suggested. If my suggested absent parent tax were implemented in the same way, then it would simply get automatically deducted at source.
Then we could start talking about more rights for the absent parent - its quite hard to assign rights to people who don't take up their responsibilities and leave them to the rest of society.
I will say one thing and that the child has rights. One of them is the right to know who Dad is, and this is something to think about in years to come.
