Child poverty - Inequality an insult to 1916 hopes

Some 66,000 children are living in poverty in this country and we have some of the youngest drug addicts and binge drinkers in Europe.

This is an insult to those idealistic people who expressed the intention in the Easter Proclamation of 1916 to cherish “all the children of the nation equally”.

Children’s charity Barnardos has launched an ambitious and imaginative 12-year programme to tackle the problem of child poverty in the run-up to the centenary of the Easter Rising in 2016. It is a fundamental tenet of real republicanism that all children should have an equal chance in life.