Ms Karen Kiernan:

I thank the Senator for the question. It is really interesting, because we know that what we do in Ireland is incremental change. We do pilots. There are some things we do a lot of. What the Senator is talking about is a much more system-wide radical change. Perhaps I am naive, but I would hope that if we did put an interdepartmental, cross-government national child poverty action plan in place with an implementation plan and a political resource and a funded resource to run it and drive it, we might start on that road. The Senator is right. The outliers and those inspirational people who make it are great, but they are not everybody. I know that we are talking a lot about working-class communities and I completely agree with what is being said. We are not embedded in one; we are a national organisation. The communities we see are one-parent families and they are everywhere. The parents are sometimes from middle-class backgrounds and their income drops. They have the same problems as perhaps people from poorer backgrounds. They did not expect to end up where they have ended up. They may have different resources and resilience. When you are parenting on your own or you are a sharing parent in a relationship and your relationship ends, everything is upended. You need more money and you may need to be able to have two homes for children to live in. As we know, many people are ending up homeless. One-parent families are still seen as anomalies. Getting separated or divorced are still seen as an anomaly. We can see that in the social welfare code and legislation. We can see it everywhere. It is codified. For some reason, in Ireland we have not yet absorbed the fact that a huge number of children are born to unmarried parents, partnered or otherwise, and a huge number of children - one in four - live in a one-parent family. Many children live in step and blended families. We have got to cope with this family diversity. We must understand it and support it. We do not yet do that. We are still boxing everyone in. The siloed approach that we mentioned earlier from Departments and at the political level is lethal. That is what is causing some of the problems here. DEIS was mentioned earlier. Some 50% of poor children in this country do not go to DEIS schools. They are not getting the support that they need in schools, and yet DEIS is there as the programme. We are leaving so many children behind. That is why targeting is so important here.