In this public lecture, Professor Bradshaw (University of York, UK) provides an overview of poverty and deprivation rates among Irish children and highlights how these children compared with counterparts from Europe and further afield. Professor Bradshaw goes on to examine some characteristics of families with children experiencing poverty, including lone-parenting, large families and ‘workless’ households. Professor Bradshaw also takes time to reflect upon our current definitions and measures of child poverty and deprivation and outlines difficulties with the use of proxy household informants and the arbitrary threshold employed when calculating relative or consistent rates of poverty. The lecture concludes with some suggested directions for future research before the speaker and audience engage in a stimulating discussion on the key points.