Government ‘continues to ignore children trapped in poverty’

THE Government is continuing to ignore children trapped in poverty or affected by alcohol abuse, a leading children’s charity said yesterday.

In a hard-hitting statement Barnardos criticised the failure of Government policies to change the lives of children at risk. Chief executive Owen Keenan said: "children can't wait and Ireland as a society and this Government has not gone anywhere near what could be achieved to make things better for children and families. I don't think we honestly can say that all children matter in Ireland today."

Barnardos works with 12,000 children and families each year, and every day its workers see parents struggle to give their children hope and a future despite dire poverty, disability and ill health, said Mr Keenan.

The charity has been campaigning to help parents under pressure, children affected by alcohol abuse and families locked in the poverty trap. "While there have been some improvements in all these areas including the establishment of the Family Support Agency and measures aimed at tackling the misuse of alcohol among young people overall the positive steps that have been taken are not meeting the scale of the problem many families and children are facing," said

Mr Keenan. "These issues can and must be solved with consistent investment in supports that have been proven to work. In some ways, many of the Government's initiatives are too little and too short we need better coherence between all the departments that impact on a child's life," he added.

He also criticised the Government for reneging on the promised increases in child benefit.

"Many of the families that we work with were the last to benefit from the Celtic Tiger economy, and are the first to feel the cuts when the economy is slowing down," he said.

Mr Keenan was speaking at a seminar in Dublin yesterday to mark the end of Barnardos' two-year advocacy campaign Every Child Matters.

A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Children said the strategies to address child poverty are set out in the revised National Anti-Poverty Strategy, the National Children's Strategy and, more recently, in the National Action Plan against Poverty and Social Exclusion. He said the overall target is to reduce the number of children who are consistently poor to below 2% by 2007 and, if possible, to eliminate consistent poverty amongst children by then.

"One of the key means of achieving a reduction in child poverty lies in reducing the numbers of parents who are unemployed," he added.