Child poverty in Ireland is decreasing, but the State still has one of the highest incidences in the EU, according to a report from the Combat Poverty agency.
Fewer Irish children live in poverty than six years ago, primarily because of growth in the number of people at work. Despite this fall, 170,000 children are growing up in poverty, warns the report, Child Poverty in Ireland, by Prof Brian Nolan of the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI). "Children in poverty have benefited from rising living standards in recent years," it says. More would have been achieved if income support for children had been kept in line with rises in wages, it continues.
The report looks at a variety of ways of calculating who lives in poverty. One method is to regard as "poor" any household with less than half the average income. By this measure, the proportion of children living in poverty fell from 29 per cent in 1994 to 26 per cent in 1997, the latest year on which the report's figures are based.
It is likely that a further improvement has taken place since then, with the continuing fall in unemployment, it says.
Nevertheless, "it is apparent that Ireland has a severe problem of child poverty". Seventeen per cent of children live in what the report calls consistent poverty. This means both that the family income is low and the children are deprived in relation to food, clothing and other basic necessities. In effect, they are the poorest of the poor and, in all, 170,000 children fall into this category. The report also finds that "children in out-of-work families are at greatest risk of poverty, i.e., where a parent is unemployed, ill or disabled or engaged in home duties". Such families account for two-thirds of all poor children, it says.
The other third are in families headed by people working for low wages (17.7 per cent), or who are self-employed (8.5 per cent) or farmers (3.9 per cent).
Compared with other EU countries, Ireland's rate of child poverty is very high, it says. Even growth in employment "seems likely to still leave Ireland as among the EU countries with high relative income poverty rates for children, though now lower than the UK and Portugal".
Weblink: http://www.cpa.ie (Combat Poverty Agency)
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