Child Poverty
Dail Éireann — 2026-09-24
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Louise O'Reilly (SF), Dublin Fingal West

I do not think the measure the Government uses for poverty will in any way interfere with the people who are living with material deprivation. I genuinely think they do not care what metric the Government chooses to measure it by because they are in poverty. The ESRI tells us very clearly that there is a rise. Some 17.4% of children are living below the poverty line. After housing costs, that goes to 22.7%. In fact, we are going in the wrong direction when it comes to child poverty. That is not a failure of the systems that are used to measure it. With the greatest of respect, that is a failure of the Government and the gap between what the Minister says he wants to do and what he actually does. The Minister has spoken repeatedly about a second tier of child benefit. That is something he should look at because the families of those children living in those homes need in-cash transfers to be able to get themselves out of poverty. Rather than quibble about those figures from the ESRI, the trend, no matter what way we measure it, is only going in one direction. That speaks to the fact that there is a gap between what the Minister said and what the reality is and that gap is widening, not closing.

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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