Conor McGuinness (Waterford, Sinn Fein)

Right now in Ireland, 5,000 children are homeless and more than 100,000 children are living in consistent poverty. That is only the tip of the iceberg and what the official figures are telling us. One in five children is living below the poverty line once housing costs are counted and 250,000 children in this State are in enforced deprivation. This is a State that has recorded unprecedented surpluses and in that context, children are paying the highest price for Government failure.

Let us not kid ourselves; this has not happened by accident. It is not happenstance. It is the consequence of years of underinvestment and a refusal to ensure adequate funding. It is the result of Ministers refusing to index core rates and child income supports and starving the very community infrastructure that keeps families afloat like family resource centres, youth work, community development programmes, breakfast and after-school clubs, addiction supports and local mental health supports. These services need multi-annual, ring-fenced funding. Instead, they have been left scrambling year to year. We see the impact of this across a whole litany of failures that face children every single day, including record child homelessness and the CAMHS crisis.

Children are waiting unconscionably long times for disability assessments. This Government is breaking the law on therapies. I could also mention scoliosis and spinal waiting lists, shortages of school spaces, school building delays, unaffordable childcare and school transport chaos. Families are turning to food banks while parents skip meals so children can eat. The ESRI has shown today that child poverty is at crash-era levels. Barnardos has shown that almost half of families are cutting back on heating, electricity or food. Targets are set in press releases only to be missed by a mile. It does not have to be this way. Sinn Féin would do what this Government will not. We would guarantee adequacy by benchmarking and indexing core welfare and child income supports, and introducing targeted measures for low- and middle-income families. We would cut family bills by extending fuel support to low-income working families, moving all prepaid meter households and expanding free hot school meals, schoolbooks and school transport.

Communities need to be funded with sustained multi-annual investment in family resource centres and youth and community development. We need to recruit the therapists and clinicians to end scandalous CAMHS and scoliosis backlogs. We also see a need, as Deputy Eoin Ó Broin has laid out quite clearly, to build public and affordable housing at scale to end the pipeline into homelessness and poverty, because that is the legacy of this Government. The money exists but what is clearly missing is the political will. The legacy of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Lowry Independents is rising child poverty and homelessness. It does not have to be this way. With the right choices and the political will, we can end it.

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