110,000 children ‘in poverty’

THE number of children living in consistent poverty is now likely to have reached 110,000, Barnardos said yesterday as it urged the next government to adopt its ‘manifesto for children’.

The children’s charity made a series of recommendations as to how child welfare could be improved, such as removing child protection from the scope of the HSE and setting up a new Department of Social Care to look after child welfare as well as other groups, such as the elderly and the disabled.

Barnardos’ chief executive Fergus Finlay said a new department with a seat at the cabinet table “would be a way of ensuring the existing models, which are not working, would be given a fresh impetus”.

Mr Finlay said “virtually none” of the recommendations outlined in the Ryan Report implementation plan had been put into practice.

He also said that more than 200 children had effectively died in care in the past decade while the recent wording put forward by the outgoing government on a proposed Constitutional amendment on children’s rights was “a set of words so diluted as to be meaningless”.

Mr Finlay added that it would cost around €1bn to run the new Thornton Hall prison in its first 10 years, by which time it will be home to the children currently being neglected by the state.

Instead, he said a national programme of prevention and early intervention would have a positive impact on the lives of vulnerable children, in addition to a renewed focus on education.