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BARNARDOS HAS SAID that €450 million has been cut from family supports in austerity budgets over the past five-years.
Presenting the children’s charity’s pre-budget submission to an oireachtas committee this morning, Barnardos chief executive Fergus Finlay said that the cuts have come from successive governments but ‘principally the current government’.
Finlay said that children have paid a disproportionate share of what needs to be done in terms of budget adjustment. “It frequently seems to us at Barnardos that somebody, somewhere in charge of public policy regards children as being the cause of the mess we’re in,” he said.
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A number of poverty and housing charities were presenting their pre-budget submissions to the Oireachtas Finance Committee this morning with each laying down a bottom-line that cuts to Government funded social services have to stop.
Focus Ireland’s Mike Allen told the committee that seven new people per day were registering as homeless with most cases ‘shockingly avoidable’. He said that HSE funded homeless services have been continually cut at least once a year.
Allen added that social housing over the last number of years has been provided primarily by the private sector with the state then leasing these houses, a policy he said that had ‘failed’.
Allen added that the fact that several charities are in Leinster House asking for relief from cuts instead of an increase in funding demonstrates how austerity has left the Government blind to the issue of poverty:
If they only thing we can say is, ‘Don’t make matters worse’, is that where we’ve come from as a nation? Somewhere along the way through the trauma of the crisis we’ve been through, the state has brutalised and become incapable of recognising the damage they are doing to the persons within the state.
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If a pre school is short 1 plaster in a box of 10,thats an automatic fail in 1st aid compliance on the report,the current report will just say 1st aid fail,it does say its because its short of a plaster. Thats hardly fair,i hope the new reports actuly report the proper issues discovered in pre schools that are not up to proper standards. Will the new laws assist the low paid staff with proper working hours,pay and entitlements ??
Couldn’t agree more. I personally know of a case where the preschool inspector complained there were too many varieties of plasters & dressings. All the new regulations will not prevent nasty people who don’t like children been mean to them like we saw on the Prime Time programme.
New legislation is all well & good. Maintaining appropriate carer:child ratios, training staff properly & paying them a credible wage is more paramount, imo…
Perhaps some regulation for childminders too, who look after children in their own home. I have come across many wonderful childminders who treat the children they look after impeccably, however they are not all the same. This is a largely unregulated area and I feel there should be some sort of inspections/reports similar to the UK.
No one cares for a
Child better that his or her parent but unfortunately during the credit tiger we lost the run of ourselves and required 2
Parents working to support ridiculous mortgages and the introduction of the chain crèche with high running costs etc
The whole country needs an overhaul not just childcare and plenty of crèche’s who pay staff fairly and treat children well they are just harder to find because the pull of the larger crèche with the so called reputation is a greater pull ….inspectors need to inspect what’s really important not tick a flip board actually sit in the crèche for few days to observe properly
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