Ms Saoirse Brady:

Certainly, we have raised the issues affecting children on both sides of the Border. We see them impacting, in particular, on Traveller children and children in families where one parent works on the Northern side of the Border and the other works in the South. Recently, there was the announcement of an affordable child care scheme in the South. What will happen with it?

That is going to be quite complex in the context of how those conditions are developed as well. What will happen, for example, to someone who lives in Fermanagh, works in Monaghan and wants to drop a child off to a child care facility near his or her workplace because it is more convenient? There are many questions in that context and we have raised them.

We have been doing a great deal of work in this area. We co-convene a child poverty subgroup with the Department of Social Protection in the Republic under the auspices of the Better Outcomes, Brighter Futures policy framework. We meet with that Department and other Departments and take the opportunity to raise some of these issues. It is something about which we are concerned. Welfare criteria, whether those applied by the Department of Social Protection or the Department of Communities in the North, are complex and people require better information and better support in order to understand them. People accessing the right social security is a fundamental human rights issue.

We have not yet achieved a living wage. Great research has been carried out by the Vincentian Partnership for Social Justice and this shows the different costs for parents of children of different ages. That needs to be taken into account. What we have seen with regard to social security benefits for lone parents and their children, in particular, is that they have been particularly badly impacted upon by the recession and the changes to social welfare eligibility criteria. That has impacted on child poverty rates and we would be particularly interested in raising that as an issue. I imagine that the same is true in the North as well.