Expert to advise how child poverty can be eliminated

If Irish society is serious about eliminating child poverty it will have to pay for it.

That stark message is being presented to a conference in Dublin today. Dr John Sweeney, lecturer in human development at St Patrick's College, Drumcondra, has studied the ways a number of wealthy countries have approached child poverty.

He will tell the conference, being organised by the Children's Rights Alliance, that lowest child poverty rates are achieved in states where the Government regards it as its task to protect living standards, and not that of the market.

"One of the most reliable predictors of a low rate of child income poverty is the proportion of GDP a country devotes to public social expenditure," he says.

It is not enough to assume that the creation of employment is sufficient to protect children against poverty, says Dr Sweeney.

In his examination of American, British and other EU countries' approaches, he found that where public policy depended on getting welfare-dependent parents into employment to lift their children out of poverty "the underlying problem of low skill \ not addressed \ the survival chances in jobs of many of the parents may be extremely poor in an economic down swing".

All child benefit payments should be made to parents regardless of whether they are working or not, says Dr Sweeney. In many English-speaking countries, including Ireland, some payments from which children benefit are cut if their parent or parents enter employment. In countries, notably Britain and the US, that have "set their face against adequate income support to able-bodied adults of working age, children have been the victims," he says.

In comparison, he cites the Dutch government's success in reducing child poverty from 12.3 per cent to 3.4 per cent in 1987 "by government taxes and transfers". This strategy did not make those households more reliant on welfare in the long term. "On the contrary, the country that most 'looked after' poor people turns out to be the one where people were most able to 'look after' themselves in the long run."

Lone-parent families are at greatest risk of poverty in all countries. Despite this there seems to be an "exceptional reluctance" in English-speaking countries to target income support at one-parent households, he says. This he puts down to a theory that this would "lead to less effort on people's part to avoid the risk in the first place".

However, he says: "There is no evidence that the countries which 'do most' for lone parents have either the highest non-employment rates among lone parents or the largest numbers of lone parents in the first place."