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”.