Professor Mary Murphy:

I hope I have understood the question. The point about care expectations goes back to the conversation we had about changing the culture of care and how that needs to happen over time. To some degree, it is a question of how the conversation about care can be amplified and accelerated in order that the culture can be shifted more quickly. I mentioned climate change and the degree to which we can see cultural values shift in respect of sustainability and people's personal and political roles in that regard. One practical example happening on the campuses at the moment relates to consent and the culture around sexuality and personal responsibility for consent. If we look at what we are trying to do there in creating those conversations and trying to force the pace of a cultural shift that may well be happening anyway but that we want to speed up, there are some quite valuable lessons. They are not all positive in that it has been very hard to get male engagement among our student population in the consent framework that has been developed. There are therefore some good policies and practices emerging but it is quite hard to make them work in practice and to get them going.

The Acting Chairman referred to the appreciation of the real value of care.

It goes back to a question that perhaps Senator Higgins asked earlier about why care needs to be universal and the penny not perhaps fundamentally dropping. At the moment, as Dr. Barry said, we frame it and our understanding in Ireland is as a sort of a labour market concept. It helps people get back into work and that is a good thing. The economy needs them. It is like that old trope about how if you invest $1 you get back $7 with the local multipliers in the economy. When we look at some of the evidence, however, taking all that aside and trying not to put it into an economic conversation, the question arises as to what the value is to the child of being cared for in a high quality environment and the degree to which care is a basic human need. It is not even just a human right; it is more than that. It is a basic need where if it not satisfied, a lot of the other developmental stages that a child might expect to go through into adulthood will never be fully formed or shaped. It is fundamental to our well-being and how we understand our human society. From that point of view, it is universal in that every child needs it. It can be achieved in a number of ways. It does not mean that every child needs to be in a formal care institution. However, every child needs an investment in quality care and every family needs support in making sure every child gets that. In that sense, it is a human right.

We need to create a cultural change around that understanding of what care is and why it is so important. Perhaps we still have not quite got there yet. As Dr. Barry said, our conversation is still very much framed around it being a labour market issue. However, there is that issue of the cost of not doing it. I am quite nervous of some of those conversations, to be honest, because they tend to point how the cost is counted. “Present day saved” tends to be one of the great indicators for what is saved by not investing in children and we end up in a very delinquent framing of the children who do not get childcare and what happens. Perhaps the cost of not doing it is more about social cost of not having a fully functioning and flourishing society to which we are all able to contribute and where we reach our full potential as human beings. The cost of that society is huge if not everybody in society is able actually to contribute as much as they potentially could have at birth. That is how we need to cost it, rather than go back and cost the number of welfare payments. The way we do these economic costings brings us in the wrong direction and starts a wrong conversation for why we want to invest in care, so I am careful with those kind of answers.