"I imagine and feel that this is not the ideal response. We are a poor country and we have to know how to manage with our limitations", the president of EAPN Portugal, priest Jardim Moreira, told Lusa.

According to the priest Jardim Moreira, "for the first time" the Government looked at Portuguese families.

"(...) It is in the family that problems are shared and where everyone shares their assets and their weaknesses (...) There is a new look at the middle class and the family as a whole", he indicated.

For Jardim Moreira, it was fundamental "to take structural measures starting from the implementation of the national strategy against poverty".

"Despite not being ideal and not being a huge response - a very generous response - (...), I think it is the first intervention [of the Government] and I hope that the evaluation of this measure can be corrected in what needs to be corrected (...)" so that there is a "balance in Portuguese society", he stressed.

"It needs to be an organised national structural response towards the poorest, because otherwise we always go around with band-aids and we can't transform people's lives, when it comes to social issues and poverty in Portugal," he added.

Prime Minister António Costa presented on 5 September the exceptional measures to support families to mitigate the effects of inflation, after an extraordinary meeting of the Council of Ministers.

This package of measures includes, among others, an extraordinary payment of 125 euros to each non-pensioner citizen with an income of up to 2,700 euros gross per month and the allocation of 50 euros to all families for each child up to 24 years old that they have in their care.