Poverty traps one in five people

ONE IN FIVE people in this country is living below the poverty line, a report will reveal next week.

The Combat Poverty Agency says more people are living on under 173 a week because they have been left behind by the Celtic Tiger.

“Poor people have more money but it does not match the large pay increases secured by many other workers during the economic boom,” the agency’s director Helen Johnston said yesterday.

“Those who got work during the boom are now at risk of losing their jobs,” she said.

While the Celtic Tiger has created 15,000 millionaires, it also pushed more people below the poverty line.

The agency, which helped the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) compile the report, wants the Government to implement the following measures:

* Increase social welfare payments in line with wage growth.

* Give tax benefits to those on lower incomes.

* Abolish tax payments for those on minimum wage.

The ESRI Monitoring Poverty Trends report will show almost 5% more people are living below the poverty line than two years ago.

A United Nations study, based on ESRI figures from 2000, showed that Ireland had the second-highest level of poverty in the Western World after America.

Combat Poverty warned yesterday that even more people were in danger of falling into the poverty trap because of the economic downturn.

ESRI director Brendan Whelan said they used two ways to measure poverty in the latest report.

One was based on a person’s income and the second on income and what an individual could afford to buy. “The lower income people can purchase more goods, but their income has not kept pace with the middle and upper income earners,” Mr Whelan said.

Combat Poverty believes the income-only measurement is the most accurate, because the goods that people can afford to buy changes over time and, therefore, is not a reliable yardstick.

This was the international measurement used in the UN report.