Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I received the report roughly a year ago. On receiving the report, I had the poverty impact of the different recommendations in it examined in some detail. I refer to changes in big systems such as social welfare. With over 600,000 families getting child benefit for nearly 1.2 million children, there was a need to look at what the changes in operations would require and how long would they take, and the advice to me was that it would take at least 18 months.

Fianna Fáil, in the programme for national plan put forward before it left Government, spoke of rebalancing and integrating child income support and having a universal component as well as a supplementary payment. I am sure Deputy O'Dea is familiar with his own party's work in Government on the issue.

The group is doing work on the interaction of tax and social welfare in families with children which includes looking at the family income supplement payment. I understand that report is due some time later this year. Taking the suite of recommendations together, I will look and see how we can better target.

The Deputy will be aware that in this year's budget I got the agreement of Government to start a pilot project for 6,500 after school child care places - the first such development - and to fund from my Department, but working through the Department of Children and Youth Affairs, an area-based approach to child poverty. In fact, we have already begun a significant programme of targeting.

As I have stated previously, I would like to see significantly more targeting. Some 22% of families are jobless households.

Children in those jobless households have a higher risk of being at poverty than anybody else so it is important to have a detailed national discussion on all the different elements of this issue.

See this speech in context