Alan Farrell (Dublin Fingal, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

That would be helpful to the committee in our future meetings on this matter.

Our guests will have to forgive me, but something that arose in the research that my office and I undertook in the past week was the concept of providing parents with more information so that they could make informed decisions. The example of the NCT popped into my head and will not leave. I have in mind a public information index, as it were. While any of the 4,500 service providers could place its certification on a wall, I do not just want to see it on the wall. If I am a new parent, I do not want to have to get into my car and drive to the front door of a facility that might be behind a gate. It should be behind a gate, actually. I want to be able to figure out whether the service has a good rating. I do not want users telling me whether it is a good service. Rather, I want Tusla, given that it is the statutory authority, to tell me whether it is a good service. That is where my idea of an NCT arose. I am not suggesting for a moment that Tusla make its risk register publicly available, but in the context of providing further information to parents so that they can make informed decisions, there should be a mechanism whereby Tusla could say on its website whether a service had passed inspection, reached a certain grade and, with the support of the provider involved, received a quality assurance mark. Whether that be done in the context of the professional side or with regard to the actual bricks and mortar, parents would be reassured if a quality assurance mark was associated with childcare services. Those are my four main points.