The Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, was wrong to deny that 300,000 children were living in families with incomes of less than €175 a week, the director of the Combat Poverty agency has said.
Ms Helen Johnston said that according to the Government's own figures, some 23.4 per cent of Irish children, or about 300,000, were living in families on less than €156 a week.
Mr Ahern disputed an assertion by the Society of St Vincent de Paul at the weekend that the families of 300,000 children lived on less than €175 a week. "There's not those kind of figures," he said. "The official figures of what people actually get in money terms do not show that."
A spokeswoman for the Department of Social, Community and Family Affairs said the Taoiseach based his assertions on the halving of the number of children experiencing consistent poverty.
A spokesman for the St Vincent de Paul, however, said it based its claim on figures from the Government-appointed Combat Poverty Agency's pre-budget submission.
In it, the agency said: "The most recent data indicate a quarter of all children (almost 300,000 children) are in income-poor households [less than €156 a week], while 6.5 per cent (about 70,000 children) live in households experiencing a combination of income poverty and deprivation of basic necessities."
The figures, Ms Johnston said, were taken from the Government's National Action Plan Against Poverty and Social Exclusion which was written by the Office for Social Inclusion and submitted to the EU last year. She said the agency did not want to get drawn into a row on statistics.
"Rather than getting hung up on who's right and who's wrong, the fact remains there is still an awful lot more to be done to address child poverty. The fact remains that there are still many thousands of children living in households where they can't afford a decent meal every day."
A spokesman for the Vincent de Paul said: "Whether it's 275,000 children or 300,000 children is irrelevant really. The facts are that there are a lot of children in trouble."
Ms Johnston added that while it was to be welcomed that consistent poverty among children had fallen from 15.3 per cent in 1997 to 6.5 per cent in 2001, "Ireland still has one of the highest levels of income poverty among children in Europe".
While overall consistent poverty has fallen from 15 per cent in 1994 to 6 per cent in 2000, relative poverty has increased from 15.6 per cent to 22 per cent and the number of children in relative poverty had increased in tandem.
In its pre-budget submission, the agency focused on family and child poverty.
"We would stress the need for increases in child benefit and an expansion in the provision of breakfast and hot meal programmes in schools," said Ms Johnston.
