Housing Provision
Dail Éireann — 2022-09-21
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Thomas Byrne (FF), Meath East

Gabhaim buíochas leis na Teachtaí Cathal Crowe agus Carey. On behalf of the Government, I welcome the report to which the Deputies have referred, Towards an Anti-Poverty Strategy for Clare, which was published by the Clare PPN. Indeed, I welcome the representatives of the network who are here today. We know that the voice of lived experience is essential for good policy and good decision-making. Democracy is made stronger by allowing diverse views and interests to be considered as part of the decision-making process of local government. It is important that we hear from those groups who are socially excluded and whose voices may not be heard in our society. Therefore, this work of the Clare PPN is extremely important.
Addressing poverty continues to be a key priority for the Government. The Roadmap for Social Inclusion 2020-2025 was published in January 2020. The primary ambition of the roadmap is to "reduce consistent poverty to 2% or less and to make Ireland one of the most socially inclusive countries in the EU." The roadmap translates this ambition into seven goals underpinned by 66 unique commitments that will help to deliver these goals. It is a whole-of-government strategy with a five-year timeframe and includes a mid-term review in 2022 to facilitate an evaluation of the impact of roadmap commitments. The social inclusion roadmap steering group, which monitors the implementation of the roadmap, has met seven times to date.
The most recent poverty data are from the 2021 survey on income and living conditions, which was published by the Central Statistics Office on 6 May 2022. There were welcome reductions in all three national rates for the key poverty indicators. Consistent poverty decreased from 4.7% to 4%, the at-risk-of-poverty rate decreased from 13.2% to 11.6% and the deprivation rate decreased from 14.3% to 13.8%. Notably, the statistics reflected the positive impact of Covid supports. Without the pandemic income supports, the at-risk-of-poverty rate would have been 19.9%.

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Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2022-09-21/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:51:03+00:00
Sitting date: 2022-09-21