Lynn Boylan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State. Tá áthas orm go bhfuil an deis a labhairt sa díospóireacht seo. I commend the Civil Engagement Group on bringing forward this issue and for their very strong words in favour of this motion in the moving of it.

We know the annual survey on income and living standards is the official source of data on households and individual incomes and it provides a number of key national poverty indicators. In May, its most recent report showed that the at-risk of poverty rate was 11.6% in 2021, which is a reduction, but it is notable that without the Covid-19 income supports, the at-risk of poverty rate would have been 19.9%. While any reduction in risk of poverty and enforced deprivation rates is welcome, what we need to see if we are serious about tackling this is a consistent reduction in the rates year on year. Figures and poverty indicators tell us that we need effective measures which support all types of families and workers across our society.

I would like to address a number of areas of concern for Sinn Féin in regard to particular groups that are impacted by poverty, no more so than lone-parent households, who we know continue to experience much higher rates of poverty than households with two adults or more. In 2021, the at-risk of poverty rate for persons living in a one-adult household with children was 22.8%, double the national average, and the deprivation rate in lone-parent families also increased between 2020 and 2021 and now stands at 44.9%. We know the Government has committed to implementing anti-poverty measures for lone parents, yet we still see nothing from it regarding overdue reforms of the child maintenance system, despite the fact the research shows that, when paid, maintenance can play a role in lifting children out of poverty. Our Sinn Féin colleagues in the Dáil have repeatedly called for the Minister, Deputy Humphreys, to publish the long-awaited report from the child maintenance review group.

Another group that is particularly vulnerable to poverty is people with disabilities or long-term illnesses, who face much higher levels of poverty than others. The European Disability Forum's human rights report 2021 found that 38.1% of people with disabilities in Ireland are at risk of poverty and social exclusion. That is the fifth worst in the EU. Again, while the Government has yet to announce any plans regarding the cost of disability, there is a clear need to provide supports which recognise the additional cost for somebody who is living with a long-term illness or a disability.

To move on to the cost-of-living crisis, which has become acute in recent months, 42% of households now say they had difficulty in making ends meet in 2021. Anybody who was listening to RTÉ radio today and who heard the woman who runs the Cork Penny Dinners centre could not help but be both horrified and moved by the compassion of that organisation and the service it is providing.The 200 people showing up were people who had either addiction issues or a particular set of problems that led them to needing the support of the Penny Dinners. Now they are seeing up to 900 people and many of them are the working poor. I find it bizarre to hear Senator Burke outlining this utopia he seems to be living in when all around us we can see the deprivation and poverty is getting worse. I recommend the Senator listens to the episode this morning from the Cork Penny Dinners.

The issue around energy poverty is one that is very close to my heart. Since I have entered this House, I have raised how the Government's energy poverty strategy lapsed in 2019 and continued to remain a non-priority. I conducted a survey in November 2019 to which we had hundreds of responses and it showed even then how acute and widespread energy poverty was before the Ukraine war induced inflation. Despite all the evidence, the Government is still not prioritising energy poverty. Sinn Féin introduced legislation which would oblige the Government to develop a strategy. Instead what the Government has done is a public consultation on the energy poverty strategy which closed in September. We need this issue to be prioritised and we need action. All of the NGOs know what the problems are around energy poverty and how we can fix them, so we do not need to be carrying out time wasting public consultations. We need action on it now.

The collection of data is of particular concern to us in that we are not collecting data on a whole range of issues. We are extremely poor as a State at collecting data. If one does not have the data and the figures it is hard to address the problems when one does not know the level or the scale of the issue. The State does not measure child, fuel or food poverty. It does not measure employment, unemployment, poverty or deprivation on a county level. It is not collecting data around the retrofitting programme in terms of household income. Therefore, we do not know how much of a wealth transfer the current retrofit programme is because we are not collecting the household income data, other than for the small cohort who are eligible for the warmer homes scheme. Interestingly, we also do not collect data on wealth. The Department of Finance repeatedly refuses to calculate the cost of implementing a wealth tax. Only recently a Government colleague was in the House telling us we cannot impose a luxury emissions tax on private jets because we do not collect the data on the number of private jets that land here; we only have estimations. We all know that if wealth is not measured, it makes it much harder to tax it.

I commend the motion and I thank the Civil Engagement Group for bringing it forward. I apologise that I have leave to go to another meeting.