Report Card 2025 is the seventeenth edition for the Children’s Rights Alliance and the final under Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Green Party’s joint Programme for Government - Our Shared Future. The Report Card analyses how the Government performed for children in 2024 and throughout its five-year term. As with previous editions, our independent panel of experts have closely examined the promises made to children and young people and have graded the Government on its efforts to fulfil these commitments. Reflecting on 2024, we can see positive steps being taken in a number of areas such as early childhood education and care, food poverty, and the provision of free school books. The recommendations outlined in Report Card 2025 should be considered as a roadmap to deliver better outcomes for children and young people. When we assess the trajectory of the commitments and efforts made from 2020 onwards, progress becomes all the more evident. However, there are several key areas for children and young people that the Government failed to hit the mark on; youth mental health, ending direct provision and family homelessness. Report Card 2025 recommendations provide the incoming Government with a clear roadmap to deliver positive change for children and young people as they embark on implementing the new Programme for Government: Securing Ireland’s Future.

P.293 ...There is a particular focus in Part B of the Code on those who provide audiovisual commercial communications which are harmful to children.50 These include communications that directly exploit children’s credulity, inexperience, or their trust in adults, or shows them in unnecessarily dangerous situations, or that specifically target them for alcohol advertising. In all of these categories, the platform will only be deemed to be in breach of the Code if they ‘specifically’ target a child for alcohol or ‘directly’ exploit children’s inexperience or credulity. While in the non-digital world, all alcohol advertising is to be banned on television and radio within certain time ‘watersheds’51 a user concerned about digital advertising will have to prove that an advertiser ‘specifically’ or ‘directly’ targeted a child, something that may be particularly difficult to do. OfCom, the United Kingdom’s communications services regulator, has strengthened its restrictions on less healthy food and drink, with these rules coming into effect in late 2025.52 Proposals by the digital platforms to comply with Part B of the Code should be at least as rigorous as those suggested by the Irish legislative ‘watersheds’ or as robust as the restraint on less healthy food suggested by the UK to protect children’s health.