Carol Nolan (Laois-Offaly, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Tá áthas orm labhairt ar an ábhar fíorthábhachtach seo inniu. Child poverty is not only an affront to the human dignity of the children who are impacted by it but to all of us in this State. It is also something we have been talking about for a long time in this House. Indeed, as I was researching this issue I came across statements made by the former Minister for Education, Seamus Brennan, in 1992 on the publication of the Green Paper on education, Education for a Changing World. This Green Paper included statements on equipping children with sufficient rates of education so they could avoid the poverty traps of deprivation and generational unemployment, which is a key indicator of child poverty rates.

Some 30 years later, we are still talking about the role of education in helping children find routes out of poverty. While the situation of a cycle of disadvantage and education has a very important role to play, it certainly should not lie with the education system to sort out all these problems. That is where the Government must step up to the mark and stop trying to ship the problem to another sector or pass it to another charity. There must be meaningful actions from the Government. It should not take constant reports, which are very informative, from the Ombudsman for Children, Dr. Niall Muldoon. The Government should be more proactive, see for itself and anticipate what needs to be done in advance and allow, and plan, for all of that.

While we have achieved some progress, clearly some of the policies in the intervening decades have been failures because children in this State still go to bed at night hungry. I accept the school meals programme is a success. I know from information provided to me from the former Minister, Senator Regina Doherty, that funding towards the provision of food to some 1,580 schools and organisations benefited 250,000 children in 2019 at a total cost of €54 million. The objective of this scheme is to provide regular, nutritious food to children who are unable, due to the lack of good quality food, to take full advantage of the education provided to them.

Unfortunately, the provision of this service to vulnerable children was massively disrupted by the Covid-19 emergency. This does not mean that brilliant and heroic efforts were not made by individual schools, the Catholic Church and charitable organisations, including the GAA and many others. I also spoke recently about helping our children to avoid the pitfalls of geographical disparities in terms of broadband access and the resource inequalities that thousands of students endure. Those students are doing their utmost to try to break the cycle of disadvantage in which they have been trapped and yet they are then faced with more barriers. We have seen that time and time again from the Higher Education Authority, HEA, which has shown us the reports. The HEA has more or less confirmed what we all knew, that is, the students from the most affluent areas will progress and stay in third level education. There are problems with students from disadvantaged areas progressing. Drop-out rates are higher in those areas because students cannot contend with the barriers they face each day.

While we are discussing this issue, I will mention the fact that students from disadvantaged areas who go to college, work part time and do everything right are faced with an accommodation crisis and do not have accommodation. Those issues need to be sorted out if we are truly hopeful and willing to eradicate child poverty and disadvantage in this State. As a former educator and principal, I feel this issue needs to be addressed robustly. It is an issue close to my own heart because I have taught in disadvantaged areas. It is also one of my main policy priorities. That is why back in the pre-Covid world of October 2019, I raised the issue of the re-establishment of the education disadvantage committee. I feel the re-establishment of the education disadvantage committee needs to happen and would be a worthwhile action.

Of course, there will be always variation in the quality of education but what we have now is something entirely different. We have a system that actively maintains educational discrimination and a closing down of opportunities for capable, interested and bright students. On the issues of broadband and access to technology, we are continuing to send our children to the equivalent of the digital poorhouse, a term drawn from Virginia Eubanks's book Automating Inequality. That appears to be exactly what we are doing. We are auto-enrolling students into a system of diminished expectations and, unfortunately, diminished outcomes. The same applies to housing and the potential for families to own their own homes. It is not about doing more, it is about getting it right. Ten effective poverty-reducing policy measures are better than 10,000 ineffective policies that go nowhere and do not bear fruits. We need to learn that lesson quickly and act accordingly.

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