Going without: measuring child poverty and social exclusion in Ireland

Based on a review of Irish and international research on children‟s experiences of poverty and living standards and small-scale exploratory interviews with children and young people, this paper explores the development of a direct measure of child poverty in Ireland. The proposed new measure locates the experience of poverty within the state of childhood itself. Currently, Ireland‟s official poverty measure – the consistent poverty measure – gives us an imprecise picture of child poverty since it conceptualises and operationalises child poverty as household-level deprivation. This measure does not tell us exactly what poor children go without in low-income families. The paper is developed as phase 1 of a wider potential research project, and it explores possible dimensions of child deprivation and social exclusion that could be used in future research in Ireland to assess child necessities and provide data on children‟s living standards and levels of deprivation. It is suggested also that indicators of public service exclusion of children should be included in measures of child poverty and that children and young people should be active participants in the development and application of child poverty indicators. This study was completed in 2008.