No targeted supports to help address child poverty – community worker
By Cate McCurry, PA
A Dublin community worker has said there are no targeted supports to help address child poverty in Budget 2025.
Fiona Kearney, who works for the community organisation FamiliBase – based in Ballyfermot and Cherry Orchard, said measures such as free schoolbooks, extended hot school meals and a double payment of child benefit will help families – but do not go far enough.
Ms Kearney works with children, young people and families based in the Ballyfermot and Cherry Orchard area.
She said she also hoped to see an increase in funding for childcare services, as well as expansion of the Building Blocks Improvement Grant, which is a grant to improve facilities and the physical environment for childcare facilities.
Ms Kearney said there is a need for targeted supports to address child poverty, rather than universal benefits such as two double child benefit payments.
She welcomed the school meals holiday hunger pilot project, an increase in carer’s support and expansion of the eligibility criteria, but said that there needs to be an increase to the kinship carers payment.
Kinship care is where children are cared for by a relative or close family friends when a parent is unable to provide that support.
Ms Kearney said: “We were really after targeted supports because not all children need the same.
“We are seeing at the moment, in our services, children coming in and families coming in who are really working hard just to keep their head above water.
“We’d like to see more of the Equal Start model for early years.”
The Equal Start model is a series of Government-funded support for children experiencing disadvantage to ensure they can access and take part in early learning and childcare.
“We’d like to see some more of these targeted supports, particularly in the early years setting, as that would really help,” she added.
“A lot of our families ended up in caring roles.
“The other big one for us is kinship care. We have a lot of families who, maybe due to addiction or family breakdown, are in this type of care.
“We have grannies, we have aunties, we even have older siblings looking after their younger siblings, or grannies looking after their grandchildren, and they’re really struggling.
“We were hoping to see some sort of payment for kinship carers and change in the means test.
“If we keep going with universal provision and increasing payments for everyone, we’re just leaving these children further behind.
“Universal benefits doesn’t deal with child poverty. It just puts a further divide between those who have the most and those who don’t.
“Double payments will help around Christmas but it’s not a sustainable change in their income.
“We really wanted to see a huge increase in the Equal Start model.
“We’d also like to see a significant increase in funding for youth services, around 8% or 9%. We need that just to keep up with the cost of living.”
