Ms Teresa Heeney:

I am very familiar with the Meath Fight for the Future campaign. One of its leaders, Mag Coogan, who owns the ABC Club crèche or playschool in Dunboyne, is a member of Early Childhood Ireland and has won awards for fantastic learning stories in which she describes the impact on preschool children of having among them a child with additional needs. All we are saying is that one solution may not always be the right one. SNAs may not always comprise the right solution. We may need to think about a more complex way of viewing that.

The other element of predictability is that it cannot be acceptable to have a geographical lottery that defines the quality of the experiences of our children. If families happen to live in an area where there is a community service with a subvention scheme, they have access to a more affordable, but still not cheap, child care service. That is not acceptable and not good enough; there should be no geographical lottery. I ask the committee to consider what we need to invest to ensure predictable blanket high-quality experiences for children in the first six years of their lives.