Ms June Tinsley:

Barnardos welcomes the opportunity to make a presentation to the joint committee. I am here with my colleague, Suzanne Connolly, who will follow me in a few moments.

Members may be aware that Barnardos provides services to children and families in more than 40 projects across Ireland. We work in some of the most disadvantaged areas of the county and we are greatly concerned about the ongoing impact that living in poverty is having on the lives of children with whom we work. Like Start Strong, Barnardos is also a member of the End Child Poverty Coalition. The most recent statistics from the EU statistics on income and living conditions, SILC, published in recent months, show that in 2011, 9.3% of children continued to live in consistent poverty. That is an increase from 8.8% in 2010 and equates to more than 106,000 children. For children, living in poverty means living on poorer diets, missing some developmental milestones, suffering from more ill health, struggling in school and increasing isolation because they are unable to participate in many activities such as going to friends' parties, swimming or basic childhood activities. For Barnardos services, we are seeing more children coming into our services hungry and more parents struggling to meet daily costs such as food, heating and housing. We see parents under immense stress trying to cope with welfare cuts, unemployment as well as issues such as domestic violence and addiction. This is having an impact on their parenting ability.

The decisions in the past budgets to make cuts to services and social welfare will only achieve short-term savings as they are realistically jeopardising children's futures. Given how entrenched child poverty can be across generations and areas, Barnardos believes that combating child poverty can only be achieved through a combination of child income supports and access to quality public services. To date, as the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, Deputy Frances Fitzgerald aptly said in the Seanad last week, we have a legacy of providing cash payments instead of investing in services. This has resulted in the continued existence of poverty traps whereby a family becomes worse off when taking up low-paid employment. We would agree that a shift towards comprehensive services is more effective in combating child poverty, allowing parents to take up low-paid jobs and enabling and supporting children to stay in education for longer. Such services would need to include a mix of universal and targeted services such as early years education, as Mr. Wolfe outlined, access to timely, free and quality health care, and regeneration projects for specific areas of disadvantage. Some efforts are being made to move along in this direction, such as the investment of €2.5 million announced in the budget in 2013 for area based poverty projects.

Barnardos believes that investment in quality, universal and targeted services should not be at the expense of further reductions in social welfare payments, as these families are already at breaking point in their ability to provide for children. Traditionally, services for children have been developed in an ad hoc and fragmented manner, often reacting to specific circumstances or problems. Interestingly, services designed to tackle child poverty and disadvantage have been approached as separate initiatives to those designed to address child welfare and protection concerns, despite many of the same families availing of both. Also, resources have been allocated along historic geographic areas rather than on population need. This fragmented evolution of services continues to fail to tackle the underlying causes of child poverty and has hindered the prevention and early intervention models of service provision that have been proven to make an enormous difference in children's lives, both in the short and long term, and to break that intergenerational cycle of poverty. Local area-based approaches can be successful.

This is proven by work undertaken by Young Ballymun and Barnados' own initiatives such as Tús Maith, which works with children aged from three to five in promoting school readiness and social and emotional competence, or our teen parenting support programme, which Ms Connolly will outline shortly. The benefit of locally developed initiatives such as these is that they are sector led and have co-operation with key agencies. It is crucial these local initiatives feed into the national framework, which is why Barnados welcomes the establishment of the child and family support agency.

This is an opportunity to mainstream learning and the success of local initiatives to combat child poverty on a broader systemic level by changing the way we deliver services. It is crucial that any reform begins with it an understanding of child welfare in its broadest sense to allow for a national framework that encompasses a range of interventions that moves across a continuum of care, from prevention and early intervention to targeted support and protection services, including youth, justice and State care.

It is reassuring to hear from the Minister that prevention and early intervention in family support are important goals for the new agency. Through our experience, Barnados knows that the cycle of intergenerational poverty can be broken through preventative interventions such as targeted family support and supports to keep children in school. At an individual level it means greater educational attainment, better employment prospects and improved health outcomes. At a societal level, the benefits yield greater savings because there is less reliance on social welfare, fewer early school leavers, long-term health and reduced criminal activity.

The child and family support agency will establish the much-needed national framework for consistent, cohesive and accountable child and family services. One of the key challenges will be to get the right balance between universal and targeted services, as services must be able to meet the needs of the child and family across the age spectrum and their different levels of need.

Universal services have an important role to play in reducing stigma and addressing equality issues that sometimes create two-tier systems while addressing challenges facing children on low incomes. To be effective in combating child poverty and welfare and protection concerns, child and family services must be child centred, designed to meet the needs of children and their families, and be evidence based. They need to be flexible in their delivery and form a co-ordinated response across interdisciplinary, statutory and NGO agencies, all working together.

We believe that experiencing poverty and deprivation at an early age can scar a child's life both in childhood and into adulthood. Our response to date has been largely piecemeal and ineffectual. As the recession continues to take hold, a shift is required towards greater co-ordinated and comprehensive services for children and families under a national framework, combined with maintaining child income supports. In addition, we must move away from reform as simply a cost-saving measure towards reform which does its best for children and families.

I will now pass over to Ms Connolly for her comments.