Dr. Naomi Feely:

It is important that we had very welcome comments from the Taoiseach at the national economic dialogue yesterday. He said that every Minister will be charged with addressing child poverty in the budget. From the perspective of the Children's Rights Alliance, what we see as a key gap is that we need to take an integrated approach on where we focus not only on income and services but also on enabling children to participate in society. When we look at the things that are important to children, one of the most important things for them tends to be play. It is something we do not talk about enough. We would like to see the establishment of a national play policy.

We want to focus on investing our resources carefully and strategically in terms of Exchequer funding.

Investing in things like education, such as providing investment for the new DEIS plus model of funding that will be applied to schools operating in areas of high levels of disadvantage, will be important because we have to ensure that all children can reach their full potential in education. There needs to be a further ramping up of the Equal Start programme in early years education. I understand the funding currently stands at €25 million per programme year. However, we need about €50 million for that programme in each programme year in order for it to have the greatest impact on children and their families.