Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal West, Sinn Fein)

The Minister must acknowledge that the direction of travel is not good, as we see from the SILC data. I respect what he is saying and it may be that the data starts going in a different direction, but I do not believe it will. A lot of the investment he mentioned involved one-off, non-recurring payments to deal with an acute cost-of-living crisis. That crisis has not gone away and is still acute. The Government is saying there will be no one-off measures in the next budget. How will it tackle the rates of child poverty? We do not need to do a poll to know those rates are unacceptable. How will the Minister deal with this issue in the absence of one-off measures? He is relying on such measures to make the argument that when they wash through, there will be a change in the figures. In the absence of those measures, long-term measures will have to be put in place to tackle the acute cost-of-living crisis that is impacting on children very severely. The figures bear that out.

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