Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal West, Sinn Fein)

It is good to see the Minister again. We hardly had time to miss each other during the short break.

It is a very sad day to be sitting at a committee and have people come in and beg for the implementation of British court rulings. As an Irish republican, I know there is very little by way of justice that comes out of the British courts, and I would certainly not be looking to repeat their judgments here.

I have a couple of questions and I will hopefully get a chance to come in again. My first questions relate to child poverty. The Minister and I know that the best and most effective way to lift children out of poverty, particularly consistent poverty, is through the use of in-cash payments, and the report from the ESRI yesterday absolutely backs that. It shows the way in which a second means-tested child benefit payment could have a transformative impact and, depending on how it is structured, could take those children out of consistent poverty. Is the Minister looking at that as a mechanism?

Could the Minister give details on the child poverty unit, which he mentioned at our last session? What will the focus be? A fair amount of analysis has already been done and there is a lot of information in the public sphere. I am not certain that more reviews are necessary. The tools are there to lift children out of consistent poverty. I worry when I hear the Minister say that child poverty is going to be a priority for him because he also said that housing was, and we saw what way that went. To put meat on the bones, what is the Minister going to be doing with the child poverty unit? Where is the focus? Is the Minister giving consideration to increasing and targeting those in-cash payments?

Lone parent households are among the most at risk of being in consistent property. Where there is a shared custody arrangement and parents are co-parenting, we know they are effectively lone parents because only one parent in that scenario is treated as the lone parent and the other is not regarded in the same way. We know that direct payments to children alleviate child poverty but they only go to one parent. In a case where there is shared custody and co-parenting, how is that divide managed? Is it the Department’s view or the Minister's view that it should be managed from within the family somehow? Has the Minister looked at any mechanism by which that in-cash transfer could be made?