Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I commend my friend and colleague, Deputy Whitmore, on bringing forward this motion on child poverty. It is an issue we all care deeply about and hope to address in the lifetime of this Dáil because we have waited far too long.

More than 200,000 children are at risk of poverty, 90,000 children are living in consistent poverty, and behind every one of those children there is a parent, often a mother, who is afflicted by that exact same poverty and in many cases suffering and going without so the child does not have to. In my contribution, I will give voice to that. The consistently most vulnerable group of people in our State have been lone parents. A shocking 50.1% of people in one-parent families with a child or children under the age of 18 are living in poverty. That is a sad indictment on our State. I raise the issue of poverty constantly because I grew up in a constituency where it surrounded and impacted me and made me passionate about making these changes. When we hear the word "poverty" sometimes, we sometimes forget what it means. It just comes across as the word and a statement and what that means to the person who has impacted by it is lost. I will give voice to that if I can.

There are indicators that were developed in 2007 to give an indication of what poverty means, and I will go through some of them. Poverty is the lack of two pairs of strong shoes; the lack of a warm waterproof overcoat; an inability to eat a meal with meat, chicken or fish every second day; it is the lack of capacity for a parent to go out and socialise with a friend. Poverty is all-encompassing. It isolates and renders a person hungry and cold. It is detrimental to the human condition, but I believe it is more than that. From conversations I have had since I have been involved in politics and working in the north inner-city community in the community development sector, I believe poverty impacts on every one of our senses as human beings. It is possible to smell poverty and taste, touch and feel poverty.

Walking around canvassing, as all of us have done over the past year or five years, we have knocked at a door and spoken to a person who has told us about his or her poverty. Walking up the North Circular Road and knocking on the doors of some of our migrant community, I walk in and see they have nowhere to store their bins. They tell me they would just like somewhere where they could store the bins so they did not have to smell it. Regarding how poverty tastes, mothers on low incomes have no alternative but to provide cheap ready-made meals because, first, they cannot afford a more nutritious variety and, second, food has to be cooked quickly because they are running out to do the cleaning jobs or are going to work.

Regarding how poverty sounds, poverty is never silent. People are in conditions that are overcrowded and vulnerable and mothers with children in those conditions have nowhere they can find a bit of silence. I had a heart-rending conversation with a mother who was homeless and placed in hotel accommodation. She told me about the indignity of being able to tuck her child into bed but not being able to leave the room and watch the television or find her own space to just be. Poverty never affords silence.

Regarding how poverty feels, I remember my first canvass for a local election in 2014, knocking at a door and a woman talked to me about the deprivation she was experiencing. She brought me into her house to show me her fridge. She opened her fridge door and there were Tupperware boxes with all the food for the week. It was clear there was one day a week where she did not eat.

Regarding how one can touch poverty, it is the old furniture that cannot be replaced, the old clothes and jackets and the impact all of that has on that person and on the human condition. Poverty is detrimental and we must endeavour to address that problem, because not to do so is enforcing a grotesque inhumanity on citizens in this State and it is not by any means a small number.

More than 700,000 people are at risk of poverty, 100,000 people are working and still experiencing poverty and 90,000 children are affected. If addressing that is not the great ambition of what we can achieve in the Dáil, I do not know what we are doing here.

I am conscious that when one talks about poverty and who is impacted by it, one starts to see history replicating itself. People who were locked away in mother and baby homes or Magdalen laundries, now that those institutions are gone, are simply being ignored by the State. Having been forced into Magdalen laundries or mother and baby homes, those people are being placed into hotel rooms and asked to live in cramped and overcrowded conditions, often to the benefit of hoteliers who we choose to benefit from other people's suffering in this country. History starts to replicate itself. Despite all the talk of ambitious targets that are not going to be met, we ignore people in poverty and choose not to do anything. We commend and change motions, or bring forward countermotions referencing welcome Government action, when the reality for people on the ground is one of suffering, hunger, pain and hardship. It is cruel and we need to address it.

There are structural changes that we can choose to make if we actually want to address the fact that children and other people in this country live in poverty. Social Justice Ireland, Single Parents Acting for the Rights of our Kids, SPARK, One Family and the Society of St. Vincent de Paul have a wealth of policy recommendations that would vastly improve the circumstances of people suffering from poverty in this country. Those policy recommendations include linking welfare rates to a minimum essential standard of living, providing housing first, investing in local authorities and publicly-owned homes. Those organisations advocate investing in a publicly-funded model of childcare. There are old things to which we should always go back, such as strong public services that seek to eradicate the suffering of the population. If that is not what governance and being involved in the State is about, we are failing miserably.

It is also important to talk about poverty as it is experienced in schools, an area about which I am passionate. When I think about what the Covid-19 pandemic has revealed, I am almost amused at the way in which we, in Ireland, use words to cover what we actually mean. When children were sent home from school in March, we talked about a "digital divide" in this country. That means that many people were unable to educate their children and young people because they did not have access to a laptop. It is interesting that we can talk about a laptop in those terms. Perhaps we can aspire to one day giving kids laptops. If a child does not have a laptop, it is not that his or her parents did not work hard enough. The truth is that a divide exists in homes all over this country and is the reason kids were not able to be educated at home when they were sent home from school. It is not only a digital divide, it is a divide in terms of basic provisions such as a table on which children can do their homework. Most young people and teenagers who were sent home from school had to step in and do care work because their parents were off working in supermarkets and elsewhere, providing essential front-line services that were keeping our hospitals and supermarkets open. We never acknowledged that. All we said was that there was a digital divide. The divide that exists for students and young people in this country is far more substantial than that.

Poverty is never inevitable. Nobody chooses poverty, neither child nor adult. No parent would choose poverty when considering how to raise a child. These problems can be addressed and solved. We are a small nation and if we cannot address the poverty of our own citizens while we are still relatively wealthy, we need to up our ambition. There is much suffering out there that can be alleviated with the right level of effort and consideration for who we are as a republic.

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