Dr. Ursula Barry:

I completely agree with what Professor Mary Murphy said about the universal approach. I also agree with some of the new ways to think about universality where one can put a cap on the wealthier section of society benefiting from a universal approach. In Ireland, there is a huge need for, and priority should be placed on, a universal pension system. We do not need to have an employment-related pension system and a pension benefit system or pension allowance. We need a universal pension system that integrates those two things together and that is one of the most important things around universality. Also, men and women should have equal access to a universal pension, at whatever level it has been set, at a societal level.

I should point out that there is a high turnover of staff in the early childhood care sector, which is directly linked to the low wage levels and the difficult conditions associated with the sector in which people work long hours, have minimal breaks and where there is little sense of a socialised workplace. A high turnover creates huge problems all of the time for individual providers. What is needed is a similar career structure to the one in primary education, for example. We also need high levels of quality care provided with attached qualifications and a career structure that encourages people to remain in the sector while having a lifetime of career development within it.

In terms of lone parents and what the early childcare system provides, we definitely need to have a system that provides not just for people to access paid employment but allows them to access all kinds of other areas of activity in their lives, which could mean involvement in their community or in education. One of the gaps in the system concerns access to the grants system. When a person decides to become a part-time student in further education and third level education, he or she has no access to the grants system. Lone parents, in particular, are a group of people who would benefit from being able to be grant-supported in order to access part-time educational opportunities. They are not alone in that regard but it is a cohort that would benefit from grants.

The ECCE system is not based on whether a person is in employment but is based on access to care as an entitlement in order that a person can access the ECCE scheme and then pursue a range of different activities. The ECCE system is limited to three hours a day on five days a week and for 38 weeks in the year. In Ireland, therefore, people who want to access a range of employment opportunities must add on to the ECCE system any paid hours within the crèche facilities or whatever childminding system is being used. ECCE is not a stand-alone system. It is also not sufficient in terms of its hours and comprehensiveness, by which I mean it is not sufficient in terms of more expansive involvement in a range or wide definition of economic activity.

Finally, Commission President von der Leyen's has committed to introducing an EU care strategy by the end of 2022. It would be interesting to see whether the kind of supports that have been associated with Barcelona, which instituted and supported the kind of ECCE system that we have here for early child care, are introduced, whether a much broader definition of care is introduced and whether the EU care system is more comprehensive. If so, then that would be extremely valuable in terms of how the funding system worked. For example, in Ireland there is a huge need to have supports from both EU and national levels for a process to decongregate the elder care system because congregated settings were shown to be highly vulnerable in lots of ways. I mean that although the settings are congregated, they create systems of isolation. We need both investment by the State and support from the EU to decongregate elder care settings into much more community-based systems. When we talk about universal care, we do not need a completely top-down centralised State services system. Universal care can be community-based services that are provided by local government, as in Scotland or wherever, yet support elder care and child care. We can have models that involves participation in various different ways at community level, of which there are lots of positive examples in different countries.