Ms Avril McMonagle:

I will respond to a few of the questions posed. On childminding, one of the key recommendations from the report is to bring unregulated childminders into the regulated system. As I pointed out earlier, that will enhance the quality of care in and of itself. To use the example of Donegal, we have somewhere in the region of 300 unregulated childminders operating and only six are notified to the HSE or the Child and Family Agency, CFA, as it is now. While it is true that the childminder sector exists, it is extremely under-utilised. For over ten years, the Donegal County Childcare Committee had a childminders' advisory worker who worked with childminders to raise the standard of care they were providing and to bring them into the regulated system but that post has now been eradicated. We have not had that post in Donegal for almost two years due to a reduction in funding. As a result, our unregulated sector is actually getting bigger and we are not utilising it properly. By contrast, in Northern Ireland in the late 1990s the situation was very similar to our current situation in that there was a huge, unregulated childminding sector. The NI authorities introduced a voucher system or tax credits which solved the problem almost overnight. Parents could not access a funding subvention for child care unless they used a registered childminder. Childminding is an under-utilised area of child care and if childminders were regulated they would be inspected in the context of pre-school standards, subject to Garda vetting, required to undergo training and, most important, would be on the radar of local child care committees in terms of availing of supports and so forth.

A second free preschool year would be extremely welcome. While we know it will not solve the problem of full-time working parents being able to afford child care, it would make a significant contribution in that regard. However, I would advise caution here. We are working on the front line with child care providers every day and have a vast amount of knowledge in this area. In that context and speaking particularly about Donegal, we would not have the capacity to facilitate a second free pre-school year at the moment. In the absence of a capital investment programme to expand the infrastructure, we could see problems arising whereby the 0 to 2.5 or 0 to 3 age group are pushed out because the child care providers will follow the money, so to speak.

Sometimes child care providers will follow the money.

Another concern is governance capacity. Our child care providers are struggling at the moment, managing three to four funding schemes with voluntary management committees running businesses. This is a significant strain on our resources. I have three part-time development officers in the Donegal county child care committee looking after 152 early childhood services. At any one time, there are at least 30 of them undergoing serious governance issues, the very issues Deputies spoke about earlier. It is not as simple as having a second preschool year as the answer to all our problems. We also need to look at the ability of the likes of the county committee to be able to support that and the extra strain this would put on child care services.