Seán Ó Fearghaíl
Question:549. Deputy Seán Ó Fearghaíl asked the Minister for Social Protection the key measures taken to tackle poverty during 2025; his priorities for 2026; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [73561/25]
View answerThursday, 18 December 2025
Questions (549)
Written answers
The national poverty reduction strategy, the Roadmap for Social Inclusion 2025-2030, aims to reduce consistent poverty to 2% or less and to make Ireland one of the most socially inclusive countries in the EU.
Recognising that poverty is multi-dimensional and requires a whole of Government approach beyond income supports, the Roadmap contains actions from across Government Departments focused on reducing poverty.
The current Roadmap contains 81 commitments across key areas - employment, older people, families and children, disabled people, communities and core essentials.
Progress on achieving the ambition of the Roadmap and its commitments have been reported in annual Progress Reports and Report Cards, which are available on gov.ie.
As of the end of September 2025, 64 Roadmap commitments were fully achieved; 3 commitments were in progress on schedule with ongoing delivery; and 14 commitments were in progress to be delivered.
My Department is currently developing a successor to the Roadmap, which is due to be published in the first half of 2026. To inform its development, a public consultation took place earlier this year, which received almost 500 responses. Consultation also took place during the Department's annual Social Inclusion Forum held in May 2025.
Specific measures by the Government in 2025 to tackle poverty include the significant supports and measures in Budget 2025, and those announced as part of Budget 2026.
Budget 2025 provided significant across the board increases in primary social protection weekly rates, in addition to a range of targeted increases to schemes. The total value of the social protection measures in Budget 2025 was €2.6 billion.
In 2026, the Government will invest €28.9 billion in social welfare, including again significant across the board increases in primary social protection weekly rates, over €1.15 billion of new measures targeted to assist households, including €320 million to reduce child poverty.
The combined effect of these measures will work to support people experiencing poverty, including families with children, older people, carers, people with disabilities and jobseekers in communities right across the country.
Independent research from the ESRI shows that, overall, the impact of the measures of Budgets 2025 and 2026 was broadly progressive, supporting households in the lower income deciles.
The decrease in the national rate of enforced deprivation for 2025, recently reported by the CSO, shows the effectiveness of measures taken under recent Budgets to offset increases in the cost of living.
In addition, based on commitments in the Programme for Government and in the Roadmap for Social Inclusion, in September 2025, the Government agreed a new child poverty target - to reduce the child consistent poverty rate to 3% or less by 2030.
The new target was informed by a public consultation process and by the need to have an ambitious target, to ensure as many children as possible are lifted out of poverty. The target represents a significant reduction from the current child consistent poverty rate of 8.5% and will guide cross-Government policies and ensure investment is targeted at families and children most in need.
The Government recognises that while overall trends show that poverty rates have reduced in recent years, work remains to be done to reduce poverty among specific groups of households and families. We are determined to continue to prioritise these households in 2026.