Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party)
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87. To ask the Taoiseach whether, in the context of the Government’s child-poverty target of reducing consistent child poverty to 3 percent or less by 2030, the statistic for “children experiencing consistent poverty” as published by the Central Statistics Office (or other measurement body) includes children who are living in emergency accommodation (including family homelessness or temporary emergency housing); if not, the number of such children; and whether there are plans to incorporate them into the measure to ensure the target covers all children in vulnerable housing situations. [61985/25]

Mary Butler (Waterford, Fianna Fail)
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The European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) is the primary source of comparable statistics on income, poverty, and living conditions across EU Member States. The survey is conducted annually under Regulation (EC) No 1177/2003 of the European Parliament and of the Council, which establishes the EU framework for the collection and compilation of such data. In Ireland, the EU-SILC is implemented by the Central Statistics Office (CSO). The survey’s sampling frame is based on private residential households, and it collects information on individuals living in private households. The population covered therefore excludes persons residing in communal establishments, collective, institutional, or non-private accommodation.

For the purposes of EU-SILC, a “private household” is defined as a group of persons sharing the same dwelling and jointly managing household affairs, or a single person living independently in a private dwelling. Persons living in communal establishments, such as care homes, prisons, hospitals, shelters, refuges, or emergency accommodation, are therefore not part of the EU-SILC target population.

This exclusion is mainly for practical and methodological reasons: it’s very difficult to conduct detailed surveys in temporary or collective accommodation, and the same standards must apply across the EU to ensure consistency and comparability between countries.

In Ireland, the consistent poverty measure combines two pieces of information that both come from EU-SILC: first, whether a person’s equivalised disposable income is below 60 per cent of the national median, and second, whether they experience enforced deprivation of basic items. Because both of these measures are based on data from the private household sample, people who are living in emergency accommodation aren’t captured by the SILC survey. That means that children in emergency accommodation are not included in the official consistent poverty estimates.

While EU-SILC cannot provide data on children who are living in emergency accommodation, the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage publishes monthly reports on homelessness, which include data on adults and dependent children residing in emergency accommodation.