Dara Calleary (Mayo, Fianna Fail)

I am aware of the report the Deputy referenced and I share her concern regarding the data from the 2024 survey on income and living conditions, SILC, presented in the report. However, as I said earlier this morning, the data does not fully capture many of the Government actions in recent years to address child poverty. SILC asks people each month to provide income and poverty status data for the previous 12 months. This creates a timing issue in that the SILC 2024 data does not include the impact of many of the measures announced in the budget of October 2024 and does not fully include the impact of measures announced in October 2023 or, indeed, October 2022. The budget measures announced in 2023 and 2024 involved the largest ever social welfare packages, which will take some time to be reflected in the SILC data. I expect that when the data begins to reflect the budget measures from 2023, 2024 and 2025, which include significant increases in the child support payment, double child benefit bonuses, free school meals, free schoolbooks and the newborn baby grant, we will see an improvement.

To be clear, even in that context, we have work to do. In fact, a huge amount of work is already under way. We are looking beyond the data to fully understand the real challenges we face. We had a very good discussion at the social inclusion forum recently and will do so again at the pre-budget forum in July. We want to ensure payments are targeted, as the Deputy said, and reaching the people who really need them. I have already gone through a number of measures this morning, particularly with Deputy Heneghan. I spoke about the focus on the working family payment and child support payment and the impact the increases in those payments will have. We will continue to support those kinds of targeted payments to those on the lowest incomes, as well as measures in other areas that are brought forward by the Department. Our actions will be guided by a new child poverty reduction target and by the work of the Taoiseach in this area.

See this speech in context