Child food poverty in Ireland: a mapping review of the national and international evidence
Vazquez Mendoza, LuciaORCID: 0000-0002-9832-2133 and McDonagh, Philip
(2022)
Child food poverty in Ireland: a mapping review of the national and international evidence.
Project Report.
Dublin City University. ISBN 978-1-91166939-5
The Economics of Belonging project led by the DCU Centre for Religion, Human Values, and International Relations has identified two urgent and interrelated policy issues in Ireland: food poverty and housing instability. At the beginning of 2021, the centre started researching both subjects. This paper provides research findings on food poverty in Ireland among children and provides policy recommendations to tackle this problem. Even before the Covid19 pandemic, many socioeconomically disadvantaged people and families with children struggled to access enough food for all family members to live healthy lives. Living in unstable households, high living costs, poor housing quality and even homelessness have aggravated the problem. The effects of food poverty on people and children are multiple, including hunger and social exclusion. Highlighting this urgent situation is essential to help those families. Designing programs and interventions to tackle children's food access and food environment and improving data collection on children simultaneously is critical.