Mary Hanafin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)

I do not propose to accept the amendment. An issue is raised with regard to children being at risk of poverty. As has been mentioned, most of these children tend to be the children of lone parents and they must always be a target group. Payment of child benefit has always been the way in which we have supported families. Child benefit is paid in respect of approximately 1.071 million children.

The programme for Government refers to a second-tier payment. One of the difficulties is that, despite research carried out by Dr. John Sweeney on this matter, no consensus has been reached on how it would be made. This has also been examined by NESC with regard to combining the qualified child allowance and the family income supplement. We have a number of ways to support children. The ESRI research on the family income supplement indicated it could help to support families.

I am not sure how quickly we can move on this in the absence of consensus. This year, to try to target support for the children most in need, rather than increasing child benefit, which is received by everybody and for which we did not have sufficient money available in the budget package, I increased the qualified child allowance by €2. At least it is targeted at the people who need it most.