Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

The Government and I, as Minister for Social Protection, are committed to reducing and eliminating poverty, as set out in the programme for Government. We are determined to ensure the most vulnerable are enabled to benefit from economic recovery through activation programmes and services and, ultimately, being able to return to work. The existing strategy for addressing poverty is the National Action Plan for Social Inclusion 2007-2016, or NAP inclusion for short. A key element of this plan is the setting of a national social target for poverty reduction. This target, which was revised by the Government following a comprehensive review in 2012, is to reduce consistent poverty to 4% by 2016 and 2% or less by 2020. In this regard, the Department recently published the social inclusion monitor which reports on progress towards achieving the national social target for poverty reduction.

Also of importance was that the data highlighted that social transfers continued to perform strongly in 2011 in reducing the at risk of poverty rate by 24 percentage points from 40% to 16%. This equates to a poverty reduction effect of Irish social welfare payment levels of 60%. While the figure decreased slightly on the 2010 figure of 62%, it is far in excess of the European Union norm of 35%. In terms of the key targets, in 2011 the consistent poverty rate was 6.9% which, according to the Central Statistics Office, "is not a statistically significant change on the 2010 figure of 6.3 per cent".

One of my priorities is to target policies and resources at the groups which carry the greatest burden and risk of poverty, namely, jobless households and children. This is reflected in the commitment to set sub-targets for these groups.

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