{"id":245444,"date":"2025-12-22T06:35:19","date_gmt":"2025-12-22T06:35:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/245444\/"},"modified":"2025-12-22T06:35:19","modified_gmt":"2025-12-22T06:35:19","slug":"almost-48000-children-received-new-baby-grant-in-its-first-year-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/245444\/","title":{"rendered":"Almost 48,000 children received new baby grant in its first year \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Almost 48,000 children have benefited from the newborn baby grant in the first year since it was introduced in Ireland.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">The grant was set up on December 1st, 2024, and is paid to families of babies born or adopted after that date.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">It pays \u20ac280 per child, and for twins the grant is \u20ac560 in addition to their regular first month\u2019s child benefit payment of \u20ac140.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Chairperson of the Oireachtas Committee on Social Protection, John Paul O\u2019Shea TD, obtained figures from the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/tags\/department-of-social-protection\/\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" title=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/tags\/department-of-social-protection\/\">Department of Social Protection<\/a> which show that the grant has been given to 47,633 children to date. <\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/tags\/dublin\/\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" title=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/tags\/dublin\/\">Dublin<\/a> has the highest number of newborn babies with 13,127 grants paid up to December 9th this year, while <a href=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/tags\/leitrim\/\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" title=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/tags\/leitrim\/\">Leitrim<\/a> had the lowest with 292 newborn baby grants paid in the county.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Mr O\u2019Shea explained that the grant was introduced to help families with the costs of a \u201cnew arrival\u201d.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">The newborn baby grant is paid automatically with the first child benefit payment, \u201cthere is no additional application for the grant so new parents don\u2019t have to do anything extra to receive it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Mr O\u2019Shea added that he was \u201cparticularly pleased to see 5,352 children in Cork have benefited from the grant so far\u201d.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">He noted: \u201cSupports like this alongside the likes of the free GP card for under-8s, free hot school meals and free school books are all designed to make life a little bit easier for young, working families.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Key commitments in the programme for Government such as the introduction of Pay Related Parents Benefit would provide extra support for young families, he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Almost 48,000 children have benefited from the newborn baby grant in the first year since it was introduced&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":245445,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[9,10,20812,52,18,13,14,6,19,17,11,12,10743,15,16,5,7,8],"class_list":{"0":"post-245444","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-breaking-news","9":"tag-breakingnews","10":"tag-department-of-social-protection","11":"tag-dublin","12":"tag-eire","13":"tag-featured-news","14":"tag-featurednews","15":"tag-headlines","16":"tag-ie","17":"tag-ireland","18":"tag-latest-news","19":"tag-latestnews","20":"tag-leitrim","21":"tag-main-news","22":"tag-mainnews","23":"tag-news","24":"tag-top-stories","25":"tag-topstories"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115761835127446765","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=245444"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245444\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/245445"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}