As every parent knows, feeding a child at primary school can be daunting. Feeding all 550,000 is very different gravy, but since the 2025 extension of the hot school meals scheme, the State has been committed to doing exactly that.
Ireland joined Finland, Sweden and Estonia in making this a universal entitlement, and others are following suit. Each country understands that growing minds need good food, and this aspiration to provide every child’s school-day nutrition is a quantum step in the pastoral care of our youngest citizens. It demonstrates the power of government to shape an inclusive society and it also has the potential to be transformative within our ailing food system.
Such interventions are not cheap, and the capitation of €3.20 per child totals €286 million this year, dwarfing all other State food contracts.
But the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and since its inception the scheme has drawn criticism from many food advocates, teachers, parents - and not least the children who are expected to eat it 183 days per year. Their beef is that the food is simply not good enough.
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Last week, Minister Dara Calleary, whose Department of Social Protection administers the scheme, published a nutrition review and a national survey conducted by Ipsos. He has announced refinements including more cold options, standardised menu cycles and improvements for children with special dietary requirements. Age-appropriate portion sizes are also proposed, which is such a self-evident requirement it’s hard to credit it wasn’t baked in from the outset. Generally, Calleary is pleased with the findings and satisfaction levels, while acknowledging there is room for improvement. He is not wrong.
Just 7 per cent of meals meet all five basic nutritional standards, half contain no vegetables and 15 per cent are high in fat, salt and sugar, despite the Minister announcing in April 2025 that these unhealthier options were coming off the menu. Almost a fifth of all food goes uneaten.
A comprehensive review would have identified deeper flaws within the scheme’s architecture. This enormous contract is almost entirely captured by profit-led providers, with 45 per cent of its total value held by just four suppliers. Even if a school has the appetite and resources to prepare their own food, they are precluded from doing so.
Meals that are assembled then chilled from precooked components at a facility in, say, Limerick, can travel as far as Donegal to be briefly blasted back into life in regen ovens, with inevitable nutritional and palatability impact. It arrives in single-use packs, to be bolted down at the same desk where the learning happens. The scheme generates 100 million of these to be disposed of annually, showing scant regard for the Government’s own sustainability directives.
That €3.20 per child can do a lot of nutritional heavy lifting but, unfortunately, the review does not illuminate where the cost of quality ingredients sits within the hierarchy of packaging, logistics, marketing and profit margins. It could do even more lifting within the increasingly sclerotic Irish food system. At a time when sectors vital to our food security, such as horticulture, are in freefall, the scheme could have a profound impact on strategies such as Food Vision 2030 - for example on its target of 10 per cent organic output. But if the Government won’t walk the walk in its procurement procedures and support Ireland’s last few carrot growers, why should they assume anyone else will?
Food is emotionally charged and a vector of inequality.
[ School meals with processed foods preferred to healthy options, audit findsOpens in new window ]
There is much stigmatising of children for being “picky” but I meet very few adults who are indifferent to what is put in front of them. It has become a potent digital medium. You will have seen mugshots circulating of some truly awful-looking meals in Irish schools. The chicken goujon has become a lightning rod in the culture wars and the Government finds itself embroiled in a topic that inflames discussions far beyond the school gate.
This report and its recommendations may lead to some improvements, but the scheme still needs an unflinching review of its business, production and service model. Tinkering at the edges may serve only to discommode the existing providers, locked in as they are to an unwieldy model that is both capital- and carbon-intensive.
Elsewhere in Government Buildings, there is much hyperbole about our “Food Island”. The truth is that from obesity rates and agricultural emissions to food poverty and security, we are not in good shape. If there is sincerity in that claim, it should start with the youngest among us. We may never be Japan, with its nutritionist in every school, but across Europe there are thriving alternative models, not least the UK’s Chefs In Schools initiative. Its golden thread is a “whole-school food approach” embedding food holistically within curricular life and making it resilient and community-owned, imbued with a meitheal spirit and hardwired to Britain’s food hinterland.
Closer to home, Duhallow Community Food Services is a non-profit food locus for north Cork, serving 30 schools while also providing meals on wheels, an onsite bakery and community restaurant. It is a rare bird, the kind of devolved and elegant solution to a local need that overly centralised Ireland struggles to let fly. In the absence of a kitchen and canteen in every school, it is surely within our power to replicate that community hub model elsewhere, toward a mixed economy of providers that gives schools actual agency around nutrition and food empowerment in the formative years.
What we are offering currently is closer to a ration than a meal - and it too often gets tossed because it is tired, unappealing and depleted of its nutritional purpose. As the Government is finding out, feeding people is complicated and pleasing everyone is nearly impossible, but if we are who we say we are, we can and must do better.
Gerry Godley is a member of Food Policy Ireland, a newly formed coalition of food experts and advocates
