Ms Bernie McNally:

The Senator is aware that we have doubled the number of early learning care and school age childcare places in the past four years. That is a big achievement and credit to the sector for working with us on that. We know we need to build more capacity. That is partly why we are considering major work with the childminding sector. We want parents to have choices, to choose between centre-based or home-based for them to do what suits them and meets their needs. We want to be able to subsidise childminding, as well as centre-based care, but we need it to be quality assured. We need to consider reform in childminding. The Minister will go out very soon to consult on this.

Childcare was identified as a strategic priority in the national development plan and €250 million has been committed to us in the latter half of the plan. We will use that to build more capacity and to examine quality. If a service is closing and parents want to go elsewhere, we talk to the local city-county childcare committee, CCC, immediately. It is on standby always to assist parents who might want to move elsewhere. There might, for example, be a new service that wants to open but cannot because it is abiding by the law until it is registered with Tusla. The CCC would often tell Tusla there is a service that wants to open in its area and ask for the registration process to be fast-tracked. There is communication of that type between the CCC and Tusla about getting new services open. Where a service has had to close down, even temporarily, because of a weather emergency, the local CCC and Pobal mobilise to find alternative provision, to see if local services can add to their numbers. In the past we have put interim management structures into community not for profit organisations but that has been very much with the co-operation and so on of the organisation. It is not legislated for but it is something we should add to the list for legislation.

If HIQA has major problems with a private nursing home and it is closed down, a public provider can offer an interim service. We do not have those powers in the early years sector but we could look at introducing them. There is a sustainability and case management process in place and we can build on it for such scenarios.