Robert Troy (Longford-Westmeath, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the four ladies who have made presentations today. We have to remember that the most important stakeholder in this sector is the child. No one disputes that high value, quality preschool education is of great importance.

I thank the various organisations that fed into our party’s proposal to bring forward a fully costed strategy and a timeline for its implementation. When we considered increased maternity leave, we considered increased capitation based on qualification and even restoring the capitation cut in the past couple of years; expanding the community child care scheme in order that children from less well-off families would not be negatively affected by where they live; and introducing a special educational needs fund, about which one of the speakers spoke. If only 200 applied for the free preschool year split over two years, how many children with special educational needs are not availing of it at all?

There are thousands of children with special educational needs, not just 200. Access to the preschool year is based on the location of the service provider, depending on the goodwill of the HSE. That is why we want a national fund. When all the outstanding quality issues are dealt with, we should work towards introducing a second preschool year.

A recent study on a child’s outcome in preschool, commissioned as part of the national early years access initiative, found that socially generated disparities between children observed at the beginning of the free preschool year tend to remain unchanged or even to widen after the free preschool year. Why is that? Only 3% of a child’s life, up to the end of the free preschool year, is spent in that year. Our party proposed a multi-dimensional policy that supports not only children but also families because a child’s learning and development unfolds and responds to the environment in which he or she lives. That environment offers great opportunities but also poses huge risks. We all know that intervention at the earliest possible time in a child’s life is critical. That is why we talk about improving families’ economic security.

Last night I spoke to a lady who used to work in family mediation in the Department of Social Protection. Her work led her to study psychology and now she works in child and adolescent mental health. We were talking in the context of the upcoming referendum about the most disadvantaged children. They are not the children with only one parent. Lone parents have financial security. Children in low-income families are most disadvantaged. Involuntary unemployment leads to the greatest social problems, to depression and poverty. That is not the best place to leave children. One of the most damning figures is that in recent years our childhood poverty figures have doubled. That is an awful indictment of our society. That is why we need to support children in the family unit, rather than exclusively investing all supports in one component of our child care setting, service providers. According to a recent Ipsos-MRBI poll published in The Irish Times, 42% of children are cared for by their grandparents, 20% by childminders and only 20% by service providers. I do not think all additional funding that becomes available over the next few years should be invested in one particular sector. We should not be directing, controlling or forcing parents to go to a service provider to avail of affordable child care. We should not tell parents who choose to go to a childminder or to leave their child with a grandparent that unless they go to a service provider, we will not give them any support, regardless of their means, rather than help them back to employment, which would put them in a position to provide economic security for their family.

People who opt to use childminders should be supported. Childminders should be regulated and vetted. That is why we as a party, when the vetting legislation was going through the Dáil, put forward proposals which, unfortunately, were not adopted. People say tax credits will do nothing for quality but the biggest problem with quality is the new registration process.

However, the legislation that passed through the Houses 15 months ago is yet to be implemented. New regulations were to be announced-----