'I want to realise my ambition to pay tax' : Kelly Fitzgerald (19) and Alan McCabe (2) from Jobstown, west Dublin. Want: Affordable childcare, a chance to get an education and a good job.
If she had the bottle, Kelly Fitzgerald would love to give the family forum a piece of her mind. And this bright single mother has a lot to say. Since she was at school, she has always wanted to be a counsellor. But her ambitions to go to university went astray when she became pregnant at 16 and abandoned her studies following her Junior Certificate.
Little more than a child herself, she is today raising her toddler Alan on her own. Unemployed, she has no option but to live in her separated mother's house, sharing a bedroom with her son and two of her young brothers, aged eight and two. Her mother is not exactly ecstatic about the arrangement, she says dryly.
What she wants is a house to call her own where she could study for her Leaving Certificate, and affordable childcare to allow her to realise her ambition to be a tax payer. She says she feels looked down upon by the county council, which gives priority on its housing list to "proper families" with two parents.
"They are more or less saying get out and get yourself a fella and we will give you a house," she says, her clear blue eyes set in what is too serious a face for one so young. "A lot of girls lose their independence because there are so many places telling you you need a man."
Kelly knows lots of other single mothers, girls who are stuck in a rut, some numbed by anti-depressants. This is not a life she wants, but she is frustrated by the barriers standing between what she now is and what she could be.
"I don't think the Government understands what we as individuals have to offer," she says of herself and many other single parents. "They don't know. They haven't given us a choice. I know lots of people who want to go to university and make something of their lives."
'At the airport she is hauled off to one side'
Shalini Sinha (30) and Willie Sweeney (53) and their children Carol (24, not in photograph), Alan (21), Tara (18) and Anish (7 months) from Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin
Want: The school curriculum to reflect ethnic diversity and changes to inheritance laws.
When they are together in public, people never assume that Shalini Sinha and Willie Sweeney are married. She is a Canadian, born to Indian parents. He is an Irish divorcee 23 years her senior. Together they have four children, aged from 24 years to seven months old, the three eldest of whom are from Willie's previous marriage.
"When you are a white man with a black woman and she's younger than you, nobody ever assumes that you are married. When you are shopping and go to put your groceries down together, they are always surprised that you are together," says Willie, a secondary school teacher. "When you come to the airport she is hauled off to one side. It's a constant reminder that society in some ways doesn't accept that you are an item."
As an anti-racism trainer, Shalini is acutely conscious of the failure of the education system her stepchildren are going through to reflect ethnic diversity and anti-racism. "It's hard for children of intercultural families to develop their self-esteem with regard to all aspects of their identity," says Shalini, who is also a presenter of Mono, RTÉ's multicultural magazine show.
Before their marriage, when Shalini wanted to move from Canada to Ireland, she had no means of migrating here as his "significant other". Instead, she came as a student. This allowed them to be together, but the legal situation did not reflect their real situation, she says.
The couple are also perturbed that, should Shalini inherit the jointly owned family home upon Willie's death, she could not then pass it on to her stepchildren without them having to pay tax. They are considered "strangers in blood" under family law, says Shalini.
'Same sex couples are not inadequate parents'
Caroline Hughes (41), Diane (46) and their son Gareth (14) from Macroom, Co Cork
Want: Legal recognition of alternative relationships and family structures.
When people ask Caroline Hughes what her husband does, it still knocks her flying. Sometimes she says "she" works on the land. Less frequently she comes straight out and says: "my husband is now a woman".
Diane, Caroline's female partner, was originally her husband and is the biological father of their son, Gareth. Unlike many families where one partner is transsexual, theirs has survived the trauma and stress of Diane's sex change. But the couple, originally from Wales, do not find it easy coping with official discrimination as well as the stares and snide comments of some people in rural Cork.
Diane brings a crusading zeal to her self-appointed role to raise awareness in Ireland about transsexuality, where people feel trapped in the body of the wrong gender. She estimates there are between 500 and 1,000 transsexuals in Ireland, including those who have been treated and those who have not. The couple want same-sex relationships to be legally recognised through some sort of civil registration. This would allow homosexuals to share the rights and responsibilities that married people take for granted. She also wants transsexuals to be able to have their sex change registered on their birth certificates and is critical of the fact that Ireland is one of only four countries in the Council of Europe not to recognise a sex change as legally valid.
"If I hadn't got Gareth, I doubt that I would be allowed to adopt," Diane says. "Yet there's nothing to suggest that same sex couples are less adequate as parents than heterosexual couples."
Diane and Caroline have tried to be open and honest with Gareth about their situation, as well as supporting him to come to terms with it himself.
"Having a transsexual parent is not the end of the world," says Diane. "Maybe having a parent who beats you is but compared to that, having a transsexual parent is small potatoes."