ALONE Submission on the Roadmap for Social Inclusion 2025
ALONE has submitted input to the Department of Social Protection for the consultation to develop a replacement for the Roadmap for Social Inclusion 2020-2025. Currently, the Roadmap for Social Inclusion aims to reduce the number of people in poverty in Ireland, with the ambition to “reduce consistent poverty to 2% or less and make Ireland one of the most socially inclusive countries in the EU”.
This Roadmap currently contains 81 commitments and asserts that by the end of 2024, 59 of these commitments were fully achieved or achieved with ongoing delivery, and 22 commitments were still in progress.
In this submission, ALONE highlights the commitments from this Roadmap that are outstanding and significant, including the lack of benchmarking the State pension and developing an action plan to address loneliness and social isolation. ALONE believes there is a “severe and deepening social exclusion among older people, which remains inadequately addressed”.
This submission asserts that if these issues are not adequately addressed, we risk older people being displaced from their communities and support networks in later life, with significant consequences for health, wellbeing, and service demand. This would represent not only a failure of planning but also a breach of the social contract that underpins a fair and inclusive society
