Seamus Brennan is a lot more interesting now than he was when he was younger. Which is unexpected. Most politicians, as they age, just get more like themselves. Road to Damascus conversions are rare in politics.

But then, you have to question how real the original Road to Damascus conversion was. Saul of Tarsus, a negative, micro-managing punitive control freak, was on his way to Damascus when he got knocked off his horse by a bolt of lightning. (And we complain about the M50f) Hitting the road . . . literally . . . he saw the light, converted to Christianity and became Paul. But, with the exception of that one paragraph he wrote about love which is much quoted at weddings and funerals, he stayed precisely the same negative micro-managing control freak he'd been as Saul. He just became a different brand of control freak. More powerful . . . as individuals tend to be when they believe their decisions are backed by the Almighty. More tedious, for the same reason.

Even God seems to have reservations about Paul . . . frequently ship-wrecking your CEO would suggest you're sick of him and his long nagging letters.

Although we all love the notion of conversion, the reality is that major changes in personality, approach or thinking happen to very few people.

It's only in novels or plays that character development is required. Yet Seamus Brennan, without making much of a fuss about it, is the exception.

In the past, he tended to be competent and cute and not much more than that. But last week's discussion paper on reconfiguring Ireland's approach to single mothers and fathers indicates he has a deep sense of the cultural and philosophical shift in this country.

Whereas many politicians talk diversity, immigrants, numbers and affluence, Brennan is one of the few talking about the quantum shift in Irish society.

Within a generation, we've moved from being a classic example of what the sociologist Durkheim called the gemeinschaft: a small, highly religious society with repressive rules and a strong collective conscience, into the opposite . . . a place with a suddenly larger, more diverse population, characterised by greater freedom for individual initiative and tolerance for a wider range of behaviours.

The tolerance isn't absolute, of course. Working recently with a group of single women who'd given birth to unplanned babies in their mid-teens, I was startled to learn the degree to which each felt humiliated and shamed by their pregnancy, hounded by questions about 'your husband' and by a sense of being looked down on.

One of them was so mortified by her situation that when it came towards the end of the nine months, she begged her older brother to turn up at the maternity hospital and let on he was her husband. She couldn't persuade him to be present at the actual birth. Even an advanced case of brotherly love has its limitations.

But he came through in every other respect, arriving, post-birth, with a bouquet of flowers the size of Asia.

When other mothers in the ward told him the baby was the spit of him, he terrified his sister by saying "Well, babies do tend to look like the families they come from."

She took the baby home. She'd already dropped out of school. Her 17-year-old pals were going places, socially and educationally. It was fair to assume that she wasn't. Sure wasn't she going to get oodles of welfare money? And, since the father of the child had disappeared, the co-habitation rule wasn't going to crimp her lifestyle.

Except that the baby straightened her out and gave her ambitions she'd never had before. She went back to school. Went on to college. Got a degree. Is starting a new job. Fair dues to her, you may say. Except that what she's achieved deserves a lot more than 'fair dues'. What she's achieved has required courage, diligence, family help, and the capacity to cope with state regulations which assume the worst of everybody and, in aggregate, work to impoverish, rather than enrich, welfare recipients, despite the widespread notion that they're all creaming off the system. Everywhere she turned, this teenage mother got clouted by restrictions.

"If I wanted to sit in front of the telly for the rest of my life, the money would have been there to support me, " she says, shaking her head at the weirdness of it. "But every time I looked at getting a qualification or improving my potential, some rule clicked in that reduced my rent allowance or made me poorer in some other way."

Those rules are throwbacks.

Throwbacks to a time when Ireland grudgingly allowed that it mightn't be a good thing to allow the children of single mothers to starve, but wanted to protect the public purse against the battalions of welfare-spongers perceived to be out there. Throwbacks to an emphasis on punishment, rather than potential.

Seamus Brennan's discussion document gives some indication that a signal shift is on the way. It's not going to be an easy shift. While welcoming the discussion paper, Frances Byrne . . . who heads up OPEN, the body representing 80 lone-parent organisations throughout the country . . . has identified potential speed bumps on the road to progress.

"The proposals on stimulating access to employment, " she points out, "represent a major challenge to a number of government departments, and based on experience to date, we lack confidence that they will step up to the mark."

In that regard, it may help that the minister in charge is a former chief whip who knows his way around those departments and their key civil servants.

And who is at an age where he just may want to be remembered as more than a cute survivor.

He could yet be the man who changed Ireland's welfare system away from inflexible mistrust based on the stereotyping of single parents into something infinitely more respectful and productive.