Mr. Niall Egan:

With regard to the way poverty is measured, we use consistent poverty but consistent poverty is the overlap between deprivation. There are 11 questions that a household is asked around whether it can afford basic necessities. If you answer that you cannot afford two or more of those, you are considered to be in deprivation. The other measure is an income measure, which concerns relative income and it measures if you are at risk of poverty. It measures income across the entire country. It calculates what median income is, or the midpoint of income. It rates that such that if a household is 60%, if its income is below that midpoint, it is deemed to be at risk of poverty.

The Central Statistics Office recently published an administrative dataset. There is a map within that which has a red colour indicator for areas with higher poverty levels. The Deputy is right; the highest concentration of poverty levels tends to be in the west and the north west. The Deputy's analysis is absolutely correct. On the map, the areas that are predominantly less red or at the opposite end of the spectrum tend to be around urban areas. What that is reflecting from the CSO's analysis is that they have higher levels of income. The income levels within certain urban areas are driving the differential between that rural-urban divide. That is why we are seeing higher levels of poverty in the north west and the west compared with the rest of the country but particularly compared with the likes of Dublin, Cork and Galway city, which have high levels of income relative to the national median.