Ms Tanya Ward:

I might answer because I am late. It is a really good question. The statistics would have been worse without the introduction of hot school meals and free schoolbooks. The ESRI did its own piece of work that came out a few days after our child poverty monitor. It was able to demonstrate that they affected child poverty by several percent. Those measures actually worked to help reduce child poverty. We know universal measures are internationally accepted in the research, and they are the best kinds of measures to do if we are going to go universal. All children benefit but children in poverty benefit the most.

What does the Government need to do? This particular budget, or the next couple of budgets, need to focus on targeted measures that are going to lift children out of poverty. Starting with income, there is a good bit of discussion in the media around a second-tier child benefit payment, and the Government seems to be open to that. What that proposal is trying to do is take a few of the additional child payments and put them into one. If someone was on a particularly low level of income, he or she would get that as a top-up. That would seem like a good idea. I would have to examine what that looked like in practice because children at the lower end might lose out, but is clear that a lot of children, where they are at risk of poverty or their families are at risk of income poverty, would benefit from a measure like that. That is a really important measure for the Government to explore and implement. In any case, increasing the child income payment for families on welfare and increasing the working family payment actually gets to the families most in need.

The other targeted measure that is going to be groundbreaking if the Government can roll it out is a DEIS plus model. The DEIS scheme is very successful but the truth is it needs a lot more supports to deal with the kinds of complexities teachers are dealing with in those communities. In the north inner city, there are the organised criminal gangs operating on their doorsteps. There are people in prison, they are dealing with huge levels of inequality and grandparents are raising children. Children need a lot of extra support, including counselling, psychological and social work support, etc. A DEIS plus model is meant to do that so rolling that out would be very important.

The other thing is that there are a lot of children in poverty, particularly in rural Ireland, who will not feature enough in the statistics to attract a DEIS plus model. What we know those children would benefit from are home school liaison officers. This is one of the most important interventions with regard to breaking the cycle of poverty. It is consistently stated that they know exactly what is going on in the households. They are the ones who help parents and help children to do well in school. Extending those out to non-DEIS schools but also extending out additional budgets to children and schools in the non-DEIS programme is what the schools are crying out for. Principals would say they have several children in their schools who are on very low incomes. They need help with buying a school uniform and to pay for the school tour. The schools need extra supports for them and need to do it in a non-stigmatising way. That is the kind of thing the Government needs to be thinking about as it moves forward.