- Read more: Ireland’s Second European Child Guarantee Interim Report 2024-2025
The European Child Guarantee is an EU initiative that seeks to ensure children at risk of poverty or social exclusion have access to key services such as early childhood learning and care, healthcare, housing, school-based education and healthy school meals. These areas are key to children’s well-being and development and play an important role in…
- Read more: Ireland’s Childcare Problem: What We Have, and What Denmark Does Differently
This paper argues that Ireland’s recent childcare fee cuts, while helpful to many parents, are masking the real problem. Ireland still has a shortage of childcare places and an underpaid workforce that subsidies alone can’t fix. This paper uses Denmark’s guaranteed-place, publicly- funded model as a benchmark to show an alternative approach to childcare.
- Read more: First 5 Annual Implementation Report 2025
The report tracks progress under First 5, the ten-year whole-of-government strategy (2019–2028) for babies, young children and their families. It highlights the launch of the ‘Shaping the Future’ action plan for the early learning and care sector, the Bia Blasta pre-school nutrition programme now running in over 470 disadvantaged-area settings, and almost 247,000 children benefiting…
- Read more: Ireland’s Literacy, Numeracy and Digital Literacy Strategy 2024-2033
The Government of Ireland has published Ireland’s Literacy, Numeracy and Digital Literacy Strategy 2024-2033: Every Learner from Birth to Young Adulthood, and a supporting five-year implementation plan. The strategy has been developed jointly by the Department of Education and the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth in collaboration with an inter-agency Steering Committee.…
- Read more: European Child Guarantee: Analysing the extent to which children in Ireland have access to key services
This paper analyses the extent to which children living in low-income households in Ireland have effective (or effective and free) access to six key services, all of which are primarily or solely regulated at the national level. Our analysis shows that there are several obstacles that impede effective access to the key services, including financial…
