EU Year Against Poverty needs more than rhetoric from the Irish Government and the EU

Social Justice Ireland believes that the Irish Government’s launch of its plans for the EU Year against Poverty and Social Exclusion is more rhetoric than real commitment. This can be seen in Government’s failure, among other things, to address the large regional differences in the levels of poverty. Government has an anti-poverty strategy, a spatial strategy and a commitment to balanced regional development but all are failing to address regional disparities in poverty. The latest statistics on poverty show that 9.3% of Dublin’s population is in poverty compared to 22.7 in the Midlands region.

The recent poverty study from the CSO provided for the first time a detailed regional breakdown of poverty levels. The data shows a very uneven national distribution of poverty. (details can be found in Table 8 on page 6 of Social Justice Ireland's Policy Briefing on Poverty.
In Dublin and the Mid-East approximately one in ten people live in poverty while the figures are twice this in the Mid-West and the Midlands. This analysis underscores the need for Government’s strategies to address poverty in both national and regional terms - a perspective absent from their approach (in reality as distinct from rhetoric) in this area heretofore.

Table 8 also reports that poverty is more likely to occur in rural areas than urban areas. In 2008 the risk of poverty in rural Ireland was 6.9 per cent higher than in urban Ireland with at risk rates of 18.2 per cent and 11.3 per cent respectively.

Social Justice Ireland believes that Government needs to change direction in its approach to reducing poverty. A good starting point would be for Ireland and the EU to adopt a target of ’zero poverty’ to be reached by 2020. This would be a very appropriate way of marking the European Year against Poverty and Social Exclusion.

There are almost 615,000 people at risk of poverty in Ireland. Almost 200,000 of these are children; 116,000 are employed (these are the ‘working poor’).

The full text of Social Justice Ireland’s recent Policy Briefing on Poverty is available on their website here.