Dáil Éireann Debate, Tuesday - 30 May 2023
42. Deputy Richard Boyd Barrett asked the Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth if he is aware of a recent report by an organisation (details supplied) that found that up to almost half of parents or their children have had to go without heat, electricity, food, clothing or other essential items over the past six months; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [26006/23]
View answer47. Deputy Richard Boyd Barrett asked the Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth if he is aware of a recent report from a charity (details supplied) which found that 73% of parents think that the cost-of-living crisis has negatively affected their child; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [26007/23]
View answerI am asking this question on behalf of Deputy Boyd Barrett. It asks whether the Minister is aware of the national representative survey carried out by Barnardos but I am quite sure the Minister is aware of it. I thank Barnardos for conducting the survey and shining a spotlight on this very important issue. The survey received responses from over 315 parents or guardians with children under the age of 18 in their care and found that up to half of them have had to go without heat, electricity, food, clothing or other essential items over the past six months.
I propose to take Questions Nos. 42 and 47 together.
I have seen the report referred to by Deputy Smith which highlights the difficulties currently being faced by children and families. There must be a cross-government response to this. My Department has recognised child poverty as a significant issue to be given a focus in the next national policy framework for children and young people 2023-28. This framework is expected to be published in the coming months.
While many children and young people are doing well, we recognise that there are acute challenges for specific cohorts who experience disadvantage, such as child poverty, and child and youth mental health and well-being challenges. The framework proposes a series of spotlight programmes focusing on these intractable issues, where some children and young people are experiencing severe difficulty and input is required from across government.
On child poverty, my Department is working closely with the Department of the Taoiseach which recently established a new child poverty and well-being programme office. The role of the Department of the Taoiseach will be to co-ordinate and focus Government action in this area. The initial focus of the office will be on six key areas, including income supports and joblessness; early learning and childcare; reducing the cost of education; youth homelessness; consolidating and integrating family and parental supports; and enhancing participation in culture and arts of children from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Significant investment has been made by my Department in the last two years to support parents with the costs of paying for early learning and childcare and a number of further measures are planned for the future. We have discussed core funding already and the investment that has brought about. In addition to core funding, the national childcare scheme, NCS, provides support to help parents meet the cost of childcare. Significant enhancements have been made to the NCS over the last year.
My Department is also currently developing a tailored policy response in order to progress the development of a new strand of funding, entitled Tackling Disadvantage: the Equal Participation Model. I often describe this as DEIS for early years. We want to design a model like the access and inclusion model, AIM, but where AIM focuses on supporting children with a disability to access early years services, the idea behind the equal participation model is to better assist children from disadvantaged backgrounds, including Traveller children, children who are in international protection and children whose families are in socioeconomic disadvantage, to engage with early learning and childcare.
Perhaps the Minister is not aware of the report, which is entitled Cost of Living Crisis: Impact on Children Report 2023. The Minister has not addressed the cost-of-living crisis and its impact in the immediate term. Instead he tells me that his Department has a strategy from 2023 to 2028.
How does that resolve the issues for families, 57% of whom, when asked, said they could not afford to allow their children to take part in social activities, 23% of whom said they could not afford school trips or activities and 43% of whom had to let their children go without adequate clothing? There are statements all over this report from people really suffering with the cost-of-living crisis: "I'm afraid to do the washing because of the price of ESB." "We've had no heating for the past two months. ... Warmer outside at times than inside ..." These are immediate issues. They do not require a strategy from 2023 to 2028; they require immediate intervention. Can you believe that in the Ireland of 2023, the third richest country on the planet, these statistics are allowed to go unanswered and undealt with by the Minister's Government? His answer is to tell me that he has this grand strategy for the next five years. We do need a strategy to end child poverty, but the Government could do that in the here and now. The Government, not just Deputy O'Gorman as Minister, has more money in the coffers than it knows what to do with. Child poverty needs to be ended and these issues have to be dealt with now.
As I said, this is an all-of-government approach. I focused in my reply on the things I am doing within my Department. I make no apologies for having a long-term strategy as to how to tackle these issues. The work we are doing now in respect of the NCS, core funding, the expansion of AIM - all those really good programmes - came about after a little long-term thought. I am very proud that we are now looking to bring forward a new strand, that being the equal participation model.
I can speak to what is happening across the Government. I can speak to the actions the Minister, Deputy Foley, has taken to reduce the cost of education for children through free schoolbooks. I can speak to the very extensive steps the Minister, Deputy Humphreys, has taken to increase the working family payment and the increase for a qualified child, IQC, to bring in the additional child benefit payments and to increase social welfare payments. There are also the energy credits that have been brought in across Government to tackle very specifically the immediate cost-of-living crisis that has been experienced.
The Minister still has not answered the question and he certainly has not addressed the Barnardos report. It is about the cost-of-living increases and their current and immediate impact. The report looks in particular at the past six months compared with the previous year and the impact these increases are having on children. It even states that they are "having an extremely detrimental or substantially negative impact on the health and well-being of the children in the families they support". The Minister is proud of the strategy, and fair play to him and all that jazz, but it does not address the report and does not address my question. It certainly does not address the deprivation and the hardship these families face. This could be dealt with immediately, and if the Minister's Government can boast about what a great job it has done on the economy and how many more billions it has in the coffers compared with what its expectations were, why does the Government not deal with this issue? It is crucial. Or are these children and families not worth it? Perhaps they are the ones who do not vote.
The fact that the Government has now created a unit dedicated to tackling child poverty for the first time ever in the history of the State is very clear evidence of the fact that the Government is committed to addressing the needs of these children and families and doing so in a way that is not once-off but systemic and looks to tackle the causes of child poverty at its roots, be they issues to do with income support,access to education and early learning or family homelessness, which we know is a major predictor as to whether a child will experience poverty during that period. The Government is very much focused on tackling this issue and is putting in place the mechanisms that can bring forward real and meaningful policy change.
