Ms Bernie McNally:

ECCE provides a stable income for providers. They know in September that they will get 38 weeks of income from the Department and exactly how much they will be paid. If a provider signs up a certain number of children at the beginning of the year, it broadly knows it will have those children to the end of the year. However, there are drawbacks to the scheme, such as the fact that we only provide funding for 38 weeks - we do not give funding through the summer. Although media coverage has represented the ECCE scheme as extremely attractive and other childcare as less attractive, there is something of a question mark over that representation. As I stated to Deputy O'Connell, in 2014 there were 13,000 places for children aged under three, whereas in 2017-18 there were 31,433 such places. Those are the cold hard data. Some services have closed their baby rooms and wobbler rooms and are focusing on ECCE, but many others provide places for children under three. We need more such places and are working to try to increase their number.