Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one before. It feels like I’ve written this particular column every year for a decade. And every year it rots still further and gets that bit more putrid.

At stake here is the decision by the Government to leave 55,000 children in poverty. That’s the number that could be lifted out of poverty overnight if the Government brought in a second level of child benefit.

And yet again we learn that the Government just can’t be bothered. It’s not that it can’t, or even definitively won’t, do it. It’s just that, well, you know, it needs a bit of work and, after all, children don’t vote.

A second child benefit payment targeted at the most needy families was first proposed in 2012 by the official Advisory Group on Tax and Social Welfare and strongly endorsed by all the members of that group, including the Department of Finance and the Revenue Commissioners.

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It’s not controversial. Almost every other OECD country does it. As well as being the morally right thing to do, it is also a fiscal no-brainer. Keeping children in poverty is the worst kind of Government borrowing: the costs of today’s neglect will have to be repaid tenfold in healthcare, crime, lost tax revenues and lost........

© The Irish Times