Gerard Craughwell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

The notion of in-work poverty seems to work its way through everything Ms Murphy has said this afternoon. My own term for it is "living in income poverty". There can be nothing more soul-destroying than picking up one's cheque at the end of the week, or the end of the month as the case may be, to find that all one has is enough to make ends meet, with absolutely no spare cash whatsoever.

I ask the witnesses to correct me if I am wrong - if they agree with me, I would be interested to hear their views - but Government policy on education seems to have moved to an input-output regime. Certainly, in my final years in the education sector before I was elected to the Seanad, we had moved to such a regime. It was all about how many students arrived in a class, how many modules they took, how many they passed, how many they did not pass, etc., and funding was driven by that.

Regarding adult literacy, for some people a return to education in adult life is very much about surviving the year, not about passing exams or being measured as an input or an output. Regarding early school leavers, again, Government policy seems to have let education down badly in so far as we still do not have in place proper supports for children attending first and second level school, or at least the supports do not naturally follow the student as he or she passes through education. I am still concerned that children who suffer from dyslexia, for example, may be told, "Sit there and colour in that page and, so long as you are quiet, no one will bother you." That is down to Government policy, a lack of guidance counselling and a lack of support in schools. Some schools are great at it; some schools are pretty miserable at it.

I would like the witnesses to address one final point. Would they agree that long-term unemployment has a tendency to propagate itself through the family - in other words, that if Dad and Mum are long-term unemployed, the children will more than likely be unemployed? At one stage in my life doing voluntary work in Limerick, there were in some cases three generations long-term unemployed all in the one house or within a house or two of one another. What I am getting at is that unless we improve income levels for those on the margins, we cannot expect an improvement in any of the other elements. We must provide those who are below the margins and those living on welfare with all the supports they need to work their way out of their situations. I would be interested in the witnesses' views on this. I thank them for their report and their constant, ongoing work in the area of social justice. It is very important.