Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

We are being stymied everywhere we go. The treatment of the archive is a result of the 2004 Act and the decision to establish the commission on the basis of its provision. The decision of the Attorney General that the GDPR applies to the archive in my Department is significant. It means that rather than a blanket "No" to access requests, we have to consider each on its individual merits. That is a good step. We will be engaging with the Attorney General and especially the Data Protection Commissioner to enable us to understand how we do that best. That will be a new thing for us. We were not expecting that but we have to address it. As I said, I welcome it and believe it is positive.

It will not be a solution to the wider issues of access to information in this archive and in the archives of other commissions into other institutional abuse that took place in this country. That solution will be through the information and tracing legislation as well as through legislation to give legal effect to a new archive of institutional abuse. This is the CoLab model that the Adoption Rights Alliance, Justice for Magdalenes and CLANN have brought forward. My engagement with this is still in its infancy but I met representatives of the Adoption Rights Alliance and I am committed to looking at it. This will involve other Departments as well. The Department of the Taoiseach will have an important role in co-ordinating the idea of an archive. That may involve a physical location for all of this information as well as a legal basis to access it.

I will comment on what Deputy Dillon was saying about early years and the importance of pay and conditions. I have identified sick pay - there is a need to provide it now that significant efforts are being made to address sick pay on a national basis. That is a really good step by the Government. I will be ensuring that childcare professionals are involved in that. There are wider issues in the context of pay. We have been making significant strides, even in recent weeks, towards the direction of a joint labour committee. I welcome the work of Childhood Services Ireland and SIPTU and their engagement with this process so far.

We are not there yet but we are working towards that. That committee can put in the basic steps of a proper pay scale so that we can adequately reward the work that childcare professionals do in this country.

The issue of fees is also significant. As I said, there are three big pieces of work, namely, the review of the operating model, the expert funding group and the workforce development plan. Two of those were established by my predecessor, Katherine Zappone, and I established the operating model review. I have made this point a number of times and I know that people get a little tired of hearing that another review is ongoing but one of the problems in the early years sector is that too many things happened on an ad hocbasis and models were created in response to an immediate need. That dates from ten years ago, a time when the State was putting no money at all into the early years sector. It was wholly privately run and only those who could afford it could engage with it. I want to gather research in those three key areas to put a good structure on a new model of childcare in this country. We must make sure that the significant State investment about which we spoke earlier - €638 million next year, even before any of the additional Covid-19 supports are counted - is going to the right places, keeping providers viable, ensuring that childcare professionals are adequately remunerated and that we can support parents so that their out-of-pocket costs are not too great. We also must ensure that children in areas of disadvantage are getting the strongest supports.