Child Poverty Dail Éireann — 2026-09-24 ============================================================ Louise O'Reilly (SF), Dublin Fingal West The ESRI findings on child poverty are a pretty damning indictment of the statements the Minister and the Government make. I think we will find it very hard to disagree with that. I am interested to know whether the Minister accepts the ESRI findings and its statement that "the Government is very far from meeting its target with regard to reducing child poverty". Rhetoric is one thing, and to be fair to the Minister's boss he is very big on that, but actual delivery is another. The statistics do not bear out what the Minister says in this Chamber. It does not seem to be translating. I want to know specifically whether the Minister accepts the ESRI findings. Does he accept that child poverty is rising? --- 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/2026-09-24/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-09-28T05:50:50+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-09-24