Dr. Naomi Feely:

I thank the Chair and the members. We really welcome the opportunity to be here with our colleagues to engage with them on this really important issue. For us at the Children's Rights Alliance, what is critical when we are talking about child poverty is that we look at the three-pillar approach and that we focus on access to quality services and access to adequate income. One gap we have had maybe in the discussion today is children and young people's participation. Every time we talk to children and young people, they say they want to see more green spaces, they want to be able to go to more dance classes, they want to be able to go to more of the latest gym class or whatever it is they are engaging in. That is critical as well. It is critical that we ensure that we have a national play strategy that really addresses that.

In relation to this budget and the budgets of the previous Government, on the income side I think we will see the impact of not increasing the child support payment to an adequate rate over recent budgets. However, we do have the potential to really focus on targeting income supports towards those families in the next four to five budgets of this Government. In the last programme for Government, we saw a number of successes, and those successes were because we took incremental investment over successive budgets. That is in the area of food poverty, expanding hot school meals and ensuring that children have a guarantee of a hot school meal in primary school. We expanded that over a five-year programme. We also addressed the issue of school costs by expanding provision of free school books to all children up to senior cycle. We need to approach the coming budgets with the same mindset. We cannot solve child poverty in one budget or in one year but we can make political decisions to really focus on investment across a number of areas. It is critical, though, that when we are talking about those budgets a cross-government approach is taken.

From the discussions here today, we have seen positive measures from one Department being negatively impact by another Department. For instance, it happens with the national childcare scheme threshold I mentioned earlier. We need to ensure those supports are increased by the same amount of money seen on the social protection side.

In the committee's discussions, it may have the opportunity to engage with children and young people. I know that is really challenging on the topic of child poverty. I do not know if the opportunity is there to engage with them in a private session. There is a very good participation focus in the Department of children with the Hub na nÓg. It does really excellent work. My colleague, Dr. Siobhán O'Reilly, recently had a conversation with a group of children who were talking about issues in their school and trying to identify ways we can bring that to decision making. It is really critical that the committee engages with children and young people and that it is not an adult-centred conversation. We really need to capture what they want to see happening because many of them will talk about housing. They know they or their friends are experiencing the impact of the housing situation. They will talk about play as well but that is really critical and we must think about that in a broad sense. I will leave it there and I thank the committee.