The real headline from today’s budget is what will, yet again, not be in it. For the 13th year in a row, a Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil-led Government will fail to get its act together to deliver the single greatest human rights imperative in Ireland: a second tier of child benefit targeted at the most vulnerable of our children.
This failure now amounts to culpable corporate negligence – the knowing neglect by the State of 55,000 kids. That’s the number who would be lifted out of poverty immediately if the Government introduced a top-up payment of €285 a month for the children most in need. It’s roughly the population of Limerick.
This measure is, by the Government’s own admission, entirely affordable. The full-year cost of the VAT reduction for the hospitality sector, including Burger King and McDonald’s, is €675 million. The second-tier child benefit would cost €770 million.
The scandal is that nobody who has considered it really disagrees. It was first proposed in 2012 by the official Advisory Group on Tax and Social Welfare and strongly endorsed by all the members of that group, including the Department of Finance and the Revenue Commissioners.
Live updates: Budget 2026 set to bring tax changes and social welfare rises but ‘move away’ from once-off payments
The economy is red hot. Tax cuts in the budget are the last thing it needs
‘There’s no way I will be able to buy a house’: What people want from Budget 2026
What time is Budget 2026? Schedule of the day and how to follow it
It’s a genuinely uncontroversial idea. Almost every other OECD country does it. Even for fiscal conservatives it makes sense – child poverty is not just a moral outrage, it’s a financial disaster. It’s the worst kind of Government borrowing: the costs of today’s neglect will have to be repaid tenfold in healthcare, crime, lost tax revenues and lost productivity. This is why the top-up has been recommended repeatedly by official or semi-official bodies: the Commission on Taxation and Welfare, the National Economic and Social Council and the ESRI. Conversely, over all of the 13 years it has been on the agenda, I have not heard one government or opposition politician say that it’s a bad idea.
So why has it not been done? Because it takes a bit of work.
The complicating factor is that the current welfare system includes two extra payments for children in poorer families. There’s a qualified child payment you can receive as part of unemployment benefit. And, if you get a job and therefore lose this benefit, you can apply for the back-to-work family dividend or the working family payment.
But these extra payments don’t do what they are supposed to do. They are very hard to get if you are self-employed or in temporary or precarious work – the kind of jobs people who are trying to move off welfare generally get. So the system in effect excludes many of the children it is meant to help. It’s a classic poverty trap.
What has to be done, therefore, is to work out in detail how a new second-tier child benefit can replace these existing payments without leaving the families who currently get them worse off. It’s a technical task. Government has to instruct the Civil Service to devote the time and expertise to get it done. It’s not especially hard to do – but it requires a modicum of seriousness and commitment.
Instead, what happens is that, year after year, taoisigh make that commitment and then can’t be bothered to see it through. Thus, in 2023, Leo Varadkar said “the proposal has real merit” but “would not be possible to introduce in 2024”. The implication was that the technical work would be done and the measure would follow in Budget 2025. Then, in the run-up to Budget 2025, Simon Harris casually announced that the work had not yet been done. He said he “certainly doesn’t rule out the idea of having two rates of child benefit” and claimed that “there’s a roadmap to how you get there”. But alas: “I don’t believe even administratively that it would be possible to do it in this budget”.
Roll on this summer’s run-up to Budget 2026. In June, Micheál Martin said that “for Budget 2026, I’ve asked my ministerial colleagues to plan and to come forward with measures that will really make the difference to the most vulnerable families and children and to target resources appropriately”.
Targeting resources means, in effect, a second means-tested child benefit. He confirmed (apparently) that the work to implement it was finally being done. Officials, he claimed, were “examining all aspects of that”.
Or were they? The Tax Strategy Group that lays out the groundwork for the budget seems oblivious to this alleged examination. It implied that in fact nothing has been done. The move, it says, “would require substantial work to refine and cost fully ... This is a complex issue that would need to be fully understood before any new second-tier payment is introduced”. Behind the circumlocution, the meaning stands stark – not only has the “substantial work” not been done but the mandarins don’t even fully understand the issue.
The entire consideration of this vital matter in those key pre-budget documents amounts to 94 words. That’s 0.001 words for every child the Government is effectively deciding to leave in poverty. Which is, in its way, very eloquent indeed.
Fear not, however. The Minister for Social Protection Dara Calleary tells us that the second tier of child benefit is “something that we are looking at within the department, and my officials are doing a lot of work on it”. And “I’m confident that we will be in a position to bring a proposal to Government in advance of Budget 2027”.
We should enter this one for the Eurovision with Johnny Logan adapting his old winner. What’s another year to a two year-old whose development is being stunted by poor nutrition? What’s another year to a three year-old with nowhere to play? What’s another year to a four year-old coping with the constant stress that deprivation brings? What’s another year to an eight year-old who is already aware (as we know even little kids are) of being different and lesser? What’s another year to a 10-year-old who has learned to internalise the shame that belongs to this fecklessly negligent Government?
