Séamus Brennan (Dublin South, Fianna Fail)

With more than 1 million children living in this country, one must approach the figure of 65,000 with caution. A series of debates is taking place on how to measure poverty. The ESRI produced a list of eight basic deprivation indicators, including not having a roast or its equivalent once a week; not having a meal with meat, chicken or fish every second day; having to go without heating due to lack of money at some point in the year; not having a substantial meal on one day in the previous two weeks; and experiencing debt problems arising from ordinary living expenses.

While these indicators point to deprivation, in certain circumstances some of the measures more closely describe lifestyle than deprivation. When we talk about relative poverty we are really talking about lifestyle as opposed to poverty as we know it. My target is to eradicate consistent poverty, which affects 65,000 people, as quickly as I can. I cannot give a timeframe within which this goal will be achieved, except to repeat a figure I gave in answer to an earlier question. In a ten year period 250,000 people, including 100,000 children, were lifted out of poverty. This shows the pace at which progress has been made. We need to dramatically accelerate progress and are doing so through substantial increases in social welfare payments. In the past five or six years, expenditure on direct social welfare benefits has increased from €7 billion to €13 billion, the bulk of which is directed towards helping the vulnerable and those on means tested schemes. A substantial portion of these moneys is paid to low income families through family income supplement and other schemes. I will continue to work on the second tier concept and hope to have a version ready soon which will target available funds at children in consistent poverty.

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