Nicola Grant Workers Party Regional Spokesperson addressing a Party meeting on poverty, said poverty is at the root of so many evils yet our Executive parties are doing nothing to address it.
Ms Grant said our Executive parties are doing nothing to address the root causes of poverty, child poverty and multiple deprivations. Generational poverty has impacted on the life chances of not only families but entire communities. Northern Ireland has the highest rates of poverty, child poverty, unemployment, multiple deprivations, health inequalities, educational underachievement, food and housing insecurity in Western Europe.
All of these issues have a major impact on the life chances of those caught in the never ending -cycle of systemic failures to tackle poverty and all its manifestations and air of hopelessness. It is absolutely scandalous that a country that is wealthy allows such conditions to exist. The workers party has been at the forefront of raising these issues and have made major submissions to the programme for government on the first steps needed to start the process of implementing policies that start to tackle the root causes of poverty caused by years of systemic neglect and indifference to the plight of the working class.
Ms Grant added those with the power and responsibility to make the necessary changes should be ashamed of their failure to address such poverty and deprivation. Their record of accomplishments on implementing policies that is making a dire situation much worse is unconscionable. She said what is needed is a proper anti-poverty strategy that is cross cutting across the entire departmental budgets and programmes and has detailed action plans with revenue costs attached to each specific programme and is ring-fenced and protected and evaluated through a process that includes timetables and key performance indicators that are measurable and consistent across each programme. Nothing less will start to mitigate the poverty and its related effects.