Varadkar could yet leave a mark of decency and justice. Here’s how

Ignore the political kites that always darken the sky at this time of the year. Don’t get distracted by all the leaks, spins, special pleading and competitive briefings that precede the budget.

Concentrate instead on one big thing. On October 10th, Michael McGrath can stand up in the Dáil and release 40,000 Irish children from the prison of poverty. If the Government wants to create the moral narrative that it so badly lacks, he should turn that key.

This budget could well be the Government’s last – and maybe even Leo Varadkar’s last too. It should not slink away but choose, rather, to leave a permanent mark of decency and justice.

It is easy to forget, when the bounty of the multinationals is raining down on us, that we have one of the most unequal distributions of market income in the developed world. That puts the onus on Government, through the tax and welfare systems, to keep a huge part of the population out of misery.

Catastrophic decline of wild Irish salmon is another of the slow scandals of Irish life

---

Have we ditched the Stardust-era stereotype that the working classes are wild and reckless?

---

We are facing the terrifying result of the West’s three stupid mistakes in the Middle East

---

If Israel succeeds in Gaza, it will drag the West down with it

---

For all its glitz, the Irish economy is still one in which, without welfare payments, about 40 per cent of us would be at risk of poverty. In 2022, the bottom 20 per cent of households had an average income from employment of just €5,533. Without transfers from the welfare system that brought it up to €16,492, these households would be destitute. And for all our spectacular GDP figures, these families are not doing well.

Between 2020 and 2021, average incomes for the bottom 40 per cent did not grow at all. For the bottom 10 per cent, incomes actually fell in real terms. Given the rapid rise in the cost of living in the last 18 months, the current picture for these families is almost certainly worse.

Irish children live disproportionately in these struggling families. No child chooses to be poor – we collectively make that choice for them.

One of the most welcome developments in recent Irish politics is that the current Government has recognised this. It has verbally committed itself to prioritising the elimination of child poverty. Last week, the minister for public expenditure Paschal Donohoe told us that “a reduction of child poverty will be a theme of the budget”.

So: just do it. There’s a single budgetary measure that already has a large consensus behind it, that is affordable and that will make an immediate and dramatic impact on child poverty.

Almost all OECD countries have supplementary child benefits targeted specifically at low-income families. Ireland doesn’t.

The current Irish system of child benefits is complicated – and complexity almost always means that the families who need them most find them beyond their grasp. They have to grapple with three layers of support.

At the moment, the Government ‘saves’ all the money that struggling families are entitled to but can’t get. That’s deeply unjust

There’s the universal child benefit payment that all families with children get, regardless of income. There’s a Qualified Child extra payment that you can receive as part of unemployment benefit. And, if you get a job and lose this second payment, you can apply for the Back to Work Family Dividend or the Working Family Payment.

But these payments are extremely difficult to get if you are self-employed or in temporary or precarious work – the kind of jobs that people who are trying to move off welfare generally get. A lot of kids don’t get these supports even though, in principle, they should.

For at least the last decade, pretty much everyone who has looked at this has concluded that the system is too complex and doesn’t work for many of the families that need it most. They’ve all said that what’s needed is a two-tier system: the current universal child benefit plus a standard – and, crucially, automatic – top-up for families with low incomes.

This consensus goes back at least to the Advisory Group on Tax and Welfare in 2012. The same proposal has been repeated by the recent Commission on Taxation and Welfare, the National Economic and Social Council, the ESRI and the Children’s Rights Alliance.

In 2011, the Department of Social Protection got as far as conducting a feasibility study on this reform. It was “not further pursued due to administrative and cost implications”.

Last week, new research by Barra Roantree and Karina Doorley for Community Foundation Ireland, published by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI), showed that this one measure in next month’s budget would lift over 40,000 Irish children out of poverty. Child poverty would be cut by a quarter.

The catch, of course, is the cost: €691 million a year. The price tag is high, but not that daunting when you remember that overall welfare spending is currently €23 billion a year.

Much of the cost, moreover, comes because this new system would actually work. At the moment, the Government “saves” all the money that struggling families are entitled to but can’t get. That’s deeply unjust.

And no one now disputes the fiscal benefits of reducing child poverty: over a lifetime, the State spends less on healthcare, crime and future welfare benefits and gets back more in taxes.

But this is about much more than money. Child poverty is the single greatest abuse of human rights in Ireland. It inflicts long-lasting physical, psychological and social harm on those who have done absolutely nothing to deserve it.

[ How adverse experiences and trauma during childhood affect the brain ]

“Our vision”, Leo Varadkar told the Dáil on his resumption of the office of Taoiseach last December, “is to make Ireland the best country in which to be a child”. He described child poverty as a national emergency.

But visions get blurred and budgetary themes become background music. All official targets for reducing child poverty have always been missed. Priorities dribble away into vague aspirations.

The Taoiseach should say: not this time. No more tinkering – big changes demand big decisions. What’s the point of being Taoiseach if you’re too scared to make them? And what’s the point of being a citizen of a republic if you run after kites and baubles? If we put our minds to it, there can be a genuinely good day for the children of the nation.