Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent)
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22. To ask the Minister for Social Protection the measures her Department has taken since the start of 2015, and the measures envisaged in the short and long-term, to deal with rising child poverty here, in view of recent statistics from the Central Statistics Office. [4984/15]

Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)
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The CSO SILC release for 2013 shows that 11.7 per cent of children were in consistent poverty, a slight but not statistically significant increase on the 2012 rate. On the other hand, the at-risk-of-poverty for children decreased from 18.8 per cent in 2012 to 17.9 per cent in 2013. A key driver in reducing income poverty among children is social transfers, which reduce the at-risk-of-poverty rate for children from 45.5% to 17.9%, thereby lifting a quarter of all children out of poverty. This equates to a poverty reduction effect of 60.7% in 2013, an increase on the 2012, when the poverty reduction effect was 50.1 per cent. Ireland is amongst the best performing member states in the EU in this regard.In Budget 2015, the Government committed a further €96 million for children, including an increase of €5 per month in child benefit. €72 million extra will be spent on child benefit in 2015 with €22 million provided for expenditure on the new Back to Work Family Dividend and an additional €2 million on the School Meals Programme.

Government policy around tackling poverty for children and families has recently been articulated in Better Outcomes, Brighter FuturesThe national policy framework for children & young people 2014-2020, which adopted a child-specific social target for poverty reduction aiming to lift 70,000 children out of poverty by 2020, equivalent to a reduction of two-thirds on the 2011 rate. To achieve this target the Government is implementing a multidimensional approach to tackling child poverty, building on the lifecycle approach in the National Action Plan for Social Inclusion, 2007-2016 and informed by the European Commission’s Recommendation on ‘Investing in children: Breaking the cycle of disadvantage’.

A key way to tackle child poverty is to get parents back to work. Through Pathways to Workand the Action Plan on Jobs, the Government is putting people into real jobs. The Family Income Supplement and new Back to Work Family Dividend will support parents, especially those furthest from the labour market, to take up and remain in employment.