Marie Sherlock (Dublin Central, Labour)

I second this motion and pay tribute to my colleague, Deputy Wall, and the rest of my colleagues for bringing it forward.

Almost 250,000 children in this country live in poverty. That is one in five children living in poverty. That is a damning indictment of a Government of a country, which this year can boast that among EU member states it has the healthiest set of public finances, the highest rate of economic growth, the highest rate of domestic demand, the lowest rate of harmonised index inflation and a general Government budget that is in surplus. In this context, how can we be a shining leader among EU member states in a country that has had budget surpluses for seven of the past nine years, during which Fine Gael has been in power, propped up by and then joined by Fianna Fáil? These figures mean that the children in this country are living in a shameful paradox of plenty.

It is not that in those nine years we have been moving from the bad situation of the economic crash to a better one. No. The number of children in consistent poverty almost doubled in 2024, rising by 45,000 children in one year alone. Despite rising wages, real household incomes, particularly among the lowest income households, have fallen in recent years. Thanks to important research by the Economic and Social Research Institute, ESRI, we can now point to findings that show that lower income households experienced inflation of 7%, while better-off households experienced a rate that was two thirds lower at 5%. The reality is that lower income households cannot avail of the multi-purchase deals. They cannot put solar panels on their homes. They are exposed to the sharp end of the cost-of-living crisis. The Minister for Social Protection and other Minsters come in here and trot out figures to show that inflation is down and that the energy crisis is not as bad as it once was. That is not the case. The rate of inflation may have eased, but prices have remained very high and the reality is that the cost-of-living crisis is hitting lower-income households the hardest.

We did not come here today just to give out. We came with proposals, which the Government is disgracefully opposing. Child poverty cannot be turned around overnight. The roots of child poverty, including joblessness, low pay and extortionate private rents, cannot be turned around quickly. However, the Government can ensure that no more than 5,000 children are living in homeless accommodation coming into this winter. The Government can introduce an immediate ban on any child being evicted into homelessness. The stories coming into my and other offices of families facing notices to quit are harrowing. I am dealing with a family at the moment who have been on the housing waiting list for ten years. They are number six in their area of Dublin City Council and they are overholding. They have nowhere to go. The mother has had to reduce her hours because her child has a disability. She cannot get services for that child. The family has been forced into poverty by the Government because of failures in housing and a failure to provide adequate services for her child who badly needs them.

One of the longer term measures the Government should have taken and now needs to take is the second tier child benefit payment. The Minister's Government and the previous Government have sat on their hands on this. The Minister said it would take a period of approximately two years to put it in place. He has offered all the reasons it cannot be put in place now and not an iota of progress has been made by the Department of Social Protection in the 13 years since the advisory group on tax and social welfare issued its report at the height of the recession. I was on that advisory group and the biggest issue was the integration of the tax and welfare systems. In a country that is home to the Europe, Middle East and Africa, EMEA, headquarters of the biggest tech firms in the world, we cannot seem to get our acts together and integrate the two systems.

The second biggest issue of the time was that our report could not have a cost impact on the public finances. Well, we live in a very different country now. We have lived in a very different country over the last decade, but nothing has been done to progress this. No one is denying that it is complicated or that there could be unforeseen losses that we need to mitigate, but the reality is we need to introduce the second-tier child benefit payment because for those families it is crucial that we ensure the State supports them out of poverty into work.

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