Protecting children in Budget 2010. A talk with Fergus Finlay from Barnardos

Over the next while members of Boards.ie will be seeing banners on the site for Barnardos, asking them to visit Barnardos.ie and sign the petition on their website.

It’s a request from Barnardos to the Minister for Finance not to cut funding to four distinct areas: Social Welfare, Housing and Social Housing, Education and Health.

The campaign is called YES/NO. It says YES to the following:

YES to a fair deal for the most vulnerable children
YES to more effective public services
YES to maintaining social welfare benefits
YES to a chance to learn, to grow, to live.

It says NO to the following:

NO to 76,000 children living in consistent poverty
NO to making kids pay for grown up mistakes
NO to budget cuts for children living in disadvantage
NO to a hard life made unbearable.

Names and messages will be passed on to the Government to put pressure on them not to make cuts that will affect vulnerable children and families.

From Barnardos on this matter:

Through our work with children and families in some of the most disadvantaged communities in Ireland, Barnardos sees the daily lived consequences of poverty and exclusion and the impact it has on children. These families simply cannot afford any further cuts to their incomes; they don’t have a safety margin from which they can trim luxuries or non-essentials.

Any further cuts to their income will result in increased hardship for children living in these families. Children account for nearly 40% of all those living in consistent poverty.

It is imperative that we take action now to protect children living in poverty and disadvantage from the worst effects of the recession. We must ensure that any actions taken with regard to the economy are underpinned by principles of proportionality and fairness and that our most vulnerable citizens are not made to bear the burden of recession with deepening poverty, disadvantage and social exclusion.

I recently met with Fergus Finlay, CEO of Barnardos to find out more about their campaign, to ask on behalf of Boards.ie members why anyone should bother signing the petition and what change he feels it could bring about. (Please excuse the awkward angle of the camera. Completely my fault.)

The document we refer to in the interview is this one (PDF, 1MB). The press release about this is here.

You can see the key recommendations Barnardos are making to the Government in this presentation:

You can view the petition and sign, if you wish, on the Barnardos website here.