Katherine Zappone (Dublin South West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Wallace. The reduction of children's poverty is a key political priority for my work as Minister. I informed the Taoiseach of that a couple of weeks ago. I have devoted all of my professional life in Ireland to the development of community based approaches to tackle children's poverty and to the design and delivery of effective prevention and early intervention strategies to do the same. I am fully committed to working with my colleagues in government, particularly the Minister for Social Protection, Deputy Varadkar, with whom I have had several discussions on which I can speak later, to ensure a collaborative approach to tackling child poverty. We will both be addressing a forthcoming conference on child poverty being organised by the Children's Rights Alliance and I am looking forward to what he will say at it. The Government set a child-specific poverty target in Better Outcomes, Brighter Futures to reduce consistent child poverty by at least two thirds by 2020, and that year is getting closer. The figure currently represents 100,000 children. I have asked to and will chair the policy consortium that leads the work of Better Outcomes, Brighter Futures to drive key actions but particularly, and the reason I asked especially for it, to drive the actions on children's poverty.

The Department of Social Protection has the lead role in co-ordinating Government strategies on child poverty. It also has the lead responsibility for the national action plan for social inclusion and has identified child poverty as a key cross-sectoral priority to be addressed. Officials in my Department are working closely with the Department of Social Protection in informing the plan for this cross-sectoral priority. In February 2016, my Department, in collaboration with the Department of Social Protection, held an EU peer review with ten EU countries to explore innovative responses in prevention and early intervention to improve outcomes for children, in particular those who experience poverty.

That is a lot of the policy but we are working towards complementing that with the actions as well.

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