Dr. Tricia Keilthy:

I thank Deputy Costello for his question. I suppose what we have seen recently is using evidence to determine what our social welfare system should be based on. The introduction of a higher rate of qualified child allowance for children over 12 is a very positive move from Government. It is recognising the extra costs of raising a teenager and it is a very targeted intervention in terms of addressing child poverty. What we would like to see is the whole system being benchmarked against the cost of a minimum essential standard of living. At present, the gap between social welfare income for a one-parent family with two children and the cost of a minimum standard is €82 every week. That parent has to borrow, go into debt or cut back to make ends meet, but if we had a system that was adequate, that addressed poverty and that provided people with enough to meet the cost of living it would give people the basis to access opportunities, access education and employment and allow families to plan for the future. At present, we have a system where people are barely staying afloat. If we had a system that was properly indexed and benchmarked against this metric, we would have a much greater impact on poverty levels in this country, particularly where we have very deep levels of income inadequacy experienced by one-parent families as well.

In terms of what works well, I would point to experience in other countries in terms of child poverty structures. Ireland is very good at developing policies but when it comes to implementation we can meet various roadblocks. In New Zealand, for example, they set up a child poverty unit to coincide with their Child Poverty Reduction Act 2018. They legislated for their targets. They have a child poverty unit, which is based in the Prime Minister's office so that it is driving action from the top and it is ensuring that there is that interdepartmental focus. What they did was amend their Public Finance Act to ensure that their budgets are comprehensively addressing child poverty. This is only a recent initiative and it is yet to be seen what impact it will have.

We need to look at what other countries are doing so we can have the targets fully addressed and ensure that implementation is driven from the top but also reaches down to our local authorities. We would also like to see local authority action plans in terms of driving that. Those are some examples.