ESRI Launch Research on Child Poverty on the Island of Ireland

Aidan and Mark attended yesterday’s webinar on the Economic and Social Research Institute launch of a comparative study of child poverty in both jurisdictions.

Aidan said: “Child poverty rates worsened over the past decade in the UK but remained relatively stable in Ireland over the 2000s.

“In both Ireland and the UK children have the highest rates of income poverty of all age groups over the past decade. The study looked at income poverty rates in both jurisdictions and also looked at indicators of material deprivation that were common to both the Northern Ireland Family Resources Survey (FRS) and the Republic of Ireland Survey on Income and Living Conditions (SILC).

“Income poverty is defined as having a disposable income that is less than 60% of median income for Ireland or the UK. In this report, material deprivation is measured by lack of access to five items that are considered as standard within societies and are common to both the FRS and SILC.

“The research showed similarities in both jurisdictions in the groups of children most at risk of child poverty. Children from large families, lone parent families, in families where the head of household had a low level of educational attainment, households where a member had a disability and households containing younger children all had a higher risk of child poverty.

“Some of the differences between the two jurisdictions included, higher rates of children affected by income poverty in the Northern Ireland due to lower wage rates, and a higher risk of income poverty for children in the Republic of Ireland where the head of household had a low level of educational attainment.”

The report was authored by Bertrand Maître (Senior Research Officer), Helen Russell (Research Professor at the ESRI and Adjunct Professor at Trinity College Dublin), Anousheh Alamir (Postdoctoral Research Fellow) and Eva Slevin (Research Assistant).

The full report can be found here