Debate contribution: Child Poverty

Debate contribution by Mr Gerry Carroll on 15 April 2024.

MLA

Mr Gerry Carroll

Party at the time

People Before Profit Alliance

Date

15 April 2024

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Private Members' Business

Heading

Child Poverty

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4483043

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I start by saying that it is deplorable in the extreme that at least one in five children here live in poverty. I say "at least" because I am sure that that is a conservative figure. The figure is around 30% in my constituency. It is not just a stat; it refers to children who go cold and hungry, children who are denied opportunities to socialise, and children whose very development is stunted by the crushing economic policies of the Tories and their abettors in this Assembly. In the debate, we have heard fine words from seemingly fine people who say that they want to end child poverty. Those are fine words because they are abstract, and they are abstract because they are hypothetical in their aims. They are far removed from the nasty policies of the current and previous Executives. "We despise child poverty", say the parties around me who have spent a decade and more impoverishing children in working-class communities like mine. "Let us reduce child poverty", say some who voted for welfare reforms like the punishing two-child tax limit. "We need a strategy to end child poverty", say parties and politicians who, last week, voted for a new round of budget cuts, including restrictions on workers' pay. Child poverty is a deliberate policy that is pursued by the Stormont Executive. It can only be a deliberate policy that has seen Stormont's Executive parties refuse to bring forward an anti-poverty strategy in the past two decades. It can only be a deliberate policy to follow the lead of a Tory Administration that has overseen the worst drop in living standards since records began. A few years ago, I saw a devastating and heartbreaking report that found that Tory austerity had caused over 333,000 excess deaths. That is an unbelievable figure. Why have the Stormont Executive followed their policy once again? Why are the new Executive doing what previous ones did? In my view, it is because the Executive have no alternative. They have accepted child poverty as an inevitable feature of our society, in spite of the obscene wealth that is concentrated in fewer and fewer private hands. I am sure that we have all seen — it has been referred to already — the stat that 62·7% of children living in poverty are from working families. Those are children whose parents and family members staff this very Building, as well as our hospitals, schools, public transport, restaurants, factories, shops and so on. They are the working poor who keep our society afloat and create the ever-growing profits of a wealthy few. It is not the millionaires or the corporations that keep our society afloat and functioning. The working poor need to see a strategy to end child poverty come forward urgently. It does not, however, take a rocket scientist to figure out where to start, and, Minister, you can stick these proposals in the strategy. We need to start by providing free school meals to all children. We need to stop cutting their parents' pay. We need to fund the services on which they rely. We need to regulate and challenge the corporate profiteers — the energy companies and supermarkets, among others — who profit while children lie cold and go hungry. We can stop hiking people's rates and rents. We can build public homes for children and their families and begin to address the crisis that has been created. We can repeal the two-child tax limit. We can back off from the cuts and revenue-raising measures that people are planning, which, we know, will force more and more into poverty. It is all well and good strategising to end child poverty, but if the actions take you in the opposite direction, you may as well just tell the public the truth, which is that most people in the Chamber accept the existence of child poverty as an unfortunate reality. They accept it because you, the parties, refuse to see beyond the horizon where the wealth of a minority is sacrosanct. They accept it because they believe that the Government's job is to mitigate and manage everyone else's expectation, including that of a child living in abject poverty. If you want to end child poverty, you need to challenge wealth inequality, invest in our communities and invest in our children. If you do not, you can table all the motions and create all the strategies that you like, but, unless parties and the Executive are prepared to act, they will not make a single bit of difference.

760 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

Not flagged

Jev’s structured answers

Assessed 21 October 2026 at 10:00 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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