‘F’ for fail: Government has a very poor grade in fighting child poverty

THAT was a good speech by Taoiseach Enda Kenny at the weekend. 

Well-delivered, solemn. He coped with increasing temperatures in the hall. The event went down well with the delegates, and I’m guessing with the public. Especially the talk about tax cuts. Stick with us, was the message, and there will be more tax cuts to reward hard work and enterprise.

That’s great. I’m all in favour of tax cuts. It’s just what we need to make us feel better — and maybe have a second holiday in the year again and maybe a little chalet abroad.

But I had a nagging feeling, listening to it all, that we need to sort out a few matters before we return to the good old Charlie McCreevy days.

They were the days when tax cuts could do everything. They could feed the hungry, house the homeless, drive our exports, pay for everything. We believed that the more we cut taxes, the more revenue would grow.

We even had a political party — the PDs — dedicated to that proposition and to nothing else. They argued constantly that they had solved all the nation’s problems by cutting taxes and getting the government off our backs. Facts — including the uncomfortable truth that we didn’t slash taxes until the economy was already growing strongly — never got in the way of their good story.

Growth enables tax-cutting. Taxes that are too high inhibit growth. But when you cut taxes to the point that you fatally undermine the tax base — and that’s what they did — you have no room left to do anything.

A story in one of the Sunday newspapers revealed the secret advice given to the government in 2008 that the economy was in rapid decline and heading for a free-fall (and this was before they knew about the banks). Faced with that urgent advice, then taoiseach Brian Cowen’s government cut taxes further.

But even if there is scope now for some relaxation, are tax cuts the right way to go?

A couple of weeks ago, in an RTÉ radio interview, the Taoiseach described child poverty as a moral imperative for any government. Oddly enough, that moral imperative didn’t make it into his speech on Saturday night.

That lack of priority is a substantial reason why the Government scored an F in the Children’s Rights Alliance Report Card published on Monday morning. F is the lowest mark possible. It means failure.

The Alliance has been publishing these report cards for some years now. They are sober and objective analyses of how our children are doing under a number of headings. Under some of these headings— childhood literacy and numeracy, for instance — we’re beginning to keep our promises and starting to see real improvements.

In overall terms, the government scores a C in respect of its commitments to children. As we remember from our own school days, C is not too bad. But a teacher would always write under a C — ‘could do better’.

But in respect of child poverty, the mark is a shaming one. It’s all the more shaming because most of the indices the Taoiseach referred to in his speech are going in the right direction.

The trajectories in relation to jobs, incomes, and the management of debt are all going one way — the trajectory in relation to children is heading downwards.

The only possible conclusion is that children have carried a hugely disproportionate share of the burden of necessary readjustment. The figures are incredibly stark — since the bubble burst in our economy, the number of children living in consistent poverty has doubled.

I’ve written here, before, about the definition of consistent poverty. You don’t fit into that definition unless two things apply. First, you have to be living in a family whose income is well below the average. And, second, you have to be experiencing deprivation. That means you have to be at risk of under-nourishment. You have to be under-protected in bad weather. Your house has to be inadequately heated.

You have to not be able to afford a visit to the doctor. You have to not have all the books or uniforms you need for school.

We have tens of thousands of children to whom these conditions apply. It is those conditions that the Taoiseach described as a moral imperative. I’ve never pretended that this is an easy problem to solve. But the worst feature of child poverty is that we know where the vast majority of these children live. We know where poverty and disadvantage are most embedded, housing estate by housing estate. And we know what will begin to break the cycle of poverty.

In every country that has taken child poverty seriously, there are well-developed, high-quality, and affordable systems of pre-school education. It is widely seen, not as the cure, but as the foundation. We know that children who have access to good, pre-school education are more likely to make the most of school itself, more likely to complete their education, more likely to make better choices throughout their lives.

One study in the US established a strong link between good pre-school education and home ownership, stable relationships, a decent employment record. In the same study, children who had enjoyed the benefits of decent pre-schooling were less likely to be welfare-dependent and less likely to be involved in crime.

Of course, there’s more to it than that. Giving every child access to GP care will be a positive step, for example.

And we are finally beginning to invest in public housing again, rather than leaving it to the vagaries of the marketplace.

But if child poverty is a moral imperative, it needs a strong, committed, government-wide response, managed and run by our leaders. We have an economic council in Ireland — it is much-criticised in some quarters, but it has been effective in driving the economic recovery. It consists of the two most senior members of the government and the two most powerful economic ministers.

Just imagine if the Government decided that, for the next five years, there was going to be a similar structure charged with the elimination of child poverty.

It would have the power to re-order priorities, to ensure that there was additional investment in the education of our children, to focus attention on the housing, childcare, pre-school and after-school issues that are at the heart of the solution.

When we had the resources to crack this issue, we did nothing about it — essentially because there was no political will to do it. Now, with fewer resources, we need more imagination and creativity, and better focus and structures. Above all, though, we need an acknowledgment that F is never good enough. We can’t keep failing our children.