Heather Humphreys (Cavan-Monaghan, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The school meals programme provides funding towards the provision of food services to 1,600 schools and organisations benefiting 260,000 children. The objective of the programme is to provide regular, nutritious food to children to position them to take full advantage of the education provided to them. The programme is an important component of policies to encourage school attendance and greater educational achievement.

Budget 2022 provided €68.1 million for the programme, with an additional €9 million provided to allow access to all new Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Schools, DEIS, schools from September 2022. Additional funding for the programme has been provided for 2023, bringing the total to €91.6 million. This represents a 49% funding increase in the period since 2020. Funding under the school meals programme can be provided for breakfast, snacks, cold lunch, dinner, hot school meals and after-school clubs and is based on a maximum rate per child per day, depending on the type of meal provided.

In March 2022, the Minister for Education announced an extension of DEIS status to an additional 320 schools from September 2022. In July, I announced that from September, access to the hot school meal option would be extended to the 282 newly designated DEIS primary schools, and the cold lunch option to the 38 newly designated DEIS secondary schools, benefiting some 60,000 children. This means that, since my appointment as Minister for Social Protection, I have increased the number of schools with access to the hot school meal option from 37 to more than 500.

I am committed to continuing to expand the school meals programme and building further on the significant extension of the programme in recent years.

See this speech in context