Poverty agency’s crisis meeting

THE board of Combat Poverty is to meet in an emergency session tomorrow to devise a survival plan amid further indications that the agency will be scrapped as a government cost-cutting measure.

Social Affairs Minister Mary Hanafin has received recommendations from a steering group in the Office for Social Inclusion (OSI), which is based in her own department, that the agency should be subsumed into that office. However, the agency, which advises the Government on how to tackle poverty, has often been critical of government policy and says it must remain a separate entity if it is to retain its independence.

Combat Poverty chairman Brian Duncan said the agency had written to Ms Hanafin, urging her to reject the steering group’s recommendations which, he said, would be a “hugely retrograde” step.