Dara Calleary (Mayo, Fianna Fail)
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The Roadmap for Social Inclusion 2020-2025 is a whole of Government strategy, with a five-year timeframe, that aims to reduce consistent poverty to 2% or less, and to make Ireland one of the most socially inclusive countries in the EU.

The Roadmap, published in January 2020, is an overarching statement of Government strategy, which acknowledges the range of sectoral plans already in place that have social inclusion as a core objective, in areas such as education, health, children and childcare, community development and housing.

Progress on achieving the ambition of the Roadmap and its commitments have been reported in four annual Progress Reports and Report Cards, which are available on gov.ie.

The Roadmap contains seven high level goals, delivered by 81 unique commitments (revised from 69 commitments after a mid-term review). Implementation of commitments is well underway, with the majority achieved and the remainder close to completion or work ongoing. At the end of March 2025:

• 60 commitments were fully achieved or achieved with ongoing delivery;
• 3 further commitments were in progress on schedule with ongoing delivery; and
• 18 commitments were in progress.

The 2024 Survey of Income and Living Conditions (SILC) was released in March 2025 and showed an increase in consistent poverty from 3.6% in 2023, which is the lowest figure on record, to 5.0% in 2024. This is, however, a slight reduction on the Roadmap baseline for consistent poverty of 5.6% in 2018.

While the latest data is disappointing, it is important to recognise that SILC 2024 refers to income in the 2023 calendar year and therefore does not reflect the Government’s full response to poverty in recent years. The significant welfare increases in Budgets 2024 and 2025 and associated cost-of-living measures delivered in 2024 are not reflected in this data.

It takes time to see the impact of work to reduce poverty and improve social inclusion in the available data, and that is why my Department, and the wider Government, are determined to continue making progress, even if that is not always immediately reflected in the statistics.

As the current Roadmap is due to conclude at the end of 2025, officials in my Department have commenced work on the development of a successor strategy. This includes a public consultation on the development of a new strategy, that took place from 10th April to 30th June 2025 and was widely promoted in the press and on social media. Consultation from stakeholders also took place prior to, and during, my Department's Social Inclusion Forum, which took place on 8th May 2025.

It is intended that my Department will prepare and publish the successor strategy to the Roadmap for Social Inclusion in the first half of 2026.