Ms Ciairín de Buis:

There is an army of grandparents who are holding up early years services and early care and education. That is wonderful if it is what those grandparents want to do, but I suspect many of them are providing that service to their children and grandchildren because of affordability issues. Grandparents should not be seen as part of a service. They are the grandparents of the child and that should be their relationship with their grandchild. A great deal of stress and mental health issues would be greatly alleviated for those grandparents if this were acknowledged.

On maternity leave and Senator White's reference to her own Bill, our recommendation, along with the National Women's Council of Ireland and others, is to ensure that the existing maternity provision remains for all women because it improves outcomes for children. It really does not matter whether a child's mother is self-employed, employed in a small or large multinational business or in the public service. What matters is the development of that relationship with their parents and particularly their mother in those early days.

We need to start taking seriously the issues raised regarding spending priorities, the second pre-school year and so on. Much of this comes back to the lack of vision at a national policy level. I do not want to get into the party politics argy-bargy, but in general, over many years, there has been a lack of vision and of priority in expenditure and we need to address that. We should have a national early years strategy that sets out the timeframe and the increase in expenditure. We are not eejits here. We know this cannot happen overnight, but it must be done incrementally over time. Part of that is a commitment to moving towards the second free pre-school year. That second free pre-school year can itself be an incentive to improve quality if we focus that public expenditure, link it and make it conditional on quality. That is what we need to move towards.

Regarding the issues raised about SNAs, of course there are excellent SNAs in place and at time they can be the right answer. At other times, it is not the right answer and can lead to a situation where a child cannot fully participate in a mainstream service if the only additional support there is a special needs assistant because it needs to be much broader than that to ensure a child can fully participate in early education.

In terms of Garda vetting, Senator White was right. This is a scandal in the making. We have 50,000 young children in the care of childminders who are not obliged to have the most basic of Garda vetting. There have been numerous opportunities to change this in recent legislation and across parties amendments have been put forward to address that and none of them have been taken on board. That needs to be addressed immediately. There is, again, an opportunity to do that with the Children First legislation that is currently on Committee Stage. I will cut myself off at that point in the interest of brevity.