Vol. 398 No. 1
133 Mr. J. Bruton asked the Minister for Social Welfare the proportion of the Irish population living in poverty in accordance with the United States measures of poverty, the level of which is a cash income less than three times the cost of a nutritionally adequate but minimum diet, which in the United States in 1983 was $10,000.
There is no measure of poverty levels in Ireland based on a nutritionally adequate diet corresponding to the poverty line used in the United States.
Issues relating to the measurement of poverty were addressed by the Economic and Social Research Institute in their report, Poverty Income and Welfare in Ireland, and also in their working paper on Concepts of Poverty and the Poverty Line. The ESRI did not adopt the US approach but stated that no entirely satisfactory and convincing method of drawing a unique poverty line is available. The ESRI consider that poverty can only be meaningfully interpreted, in a country such as Ireland, in the context of the standard of living and ordinary living patterns in that particular society. They, therefore, concentrated their efforts on measuring poverty by means of a set of relative poverty lines. I intend to continue to support their very valuable work in this area.
