Dr. Naomi Feely:

I might pick up on a point the Senator asked earlier after clarifying the process on child protection. We are undertaking that work. We have not yet gone out to field work. We are looking at setting up an advisory group that will oversee it, which will include members of the Children's Rights Alliance. I envisage that work will take place over quarter 4 of 2025. As soon as we have those findings, we will be very happy to share them, because they will be critical to capturing that evidence base of what is happening on the ground.

Senator Keogan made a point earlier on about the in-kind benefits, which I will briefly respond to. It was an important point. From the perspective of the Children’s Rights Alliance, one thing we have noticed over the past number of years is a growing concern around food poverty. We have been really lucky. Through a number of donations, we have distributed €1 million in funding to support organisations, our members on the ground and families and children with direct food costs. This means providing them with supermarket vouchers or even hampers of food. That is a critical concern.

In budget 2026, we see no expansion of the hot school meals scheme. We have seen a very welcome development from the Department of Health in that it will provide additional environmental health officers to inspect the nutrition level of hot school meals in primary schools. However, one real concern for us is that the Government funded a holiday-hunger pilot programme this past summer, and there is no additional funding to support that next summer. We are very concerned about this because those in-kind supports are really beneficial. They put money back into the pockets of parents. The MESL data really shows that, in particular, the previous Government was very successful in expanding free school books to all pupils.