No Child 2020 is an initiative by The Irish Times, providing a sustained focus on child welfare and children’s issues over the coming year. It explores the issues facing children in Ireland today and the policies we need to adopt now, to make this a better country to be a child
About one-tenth – 105,000 – of Ireland’s children grow up in consistent poverty. That means they live in a household with a very low income and go without basics such as heat or nutritious food.
There are three levels of poverty:
- Any household with an income of less than 60 per cent of the Irish median is relatively poor and "at risk of poverty". In 2017, 18.8 per cent of children in Ireland were in this category;
- "Material deprivation" means going without two of 11 indicators each month. In 2017, 23 per cent of children were in this type of poverty;
- "Consistent" poverty is when a person is both relatively poor and materially deprived. In 2017, this affected 6.7 per cent of children.
The chart below shows how many adults and children in Ireland are at risk of poverty compared with the rest of Europe.
Child homelessness rose 14 per cent between November 2017 and November 2018.
More than 1,700 children were in the system in September 2018.
In August 2018, 2,453 children and young adults were waiting for the HSE to provide them with an appointment, including more than 300 who had been waiting longer than 12 months.
