Ms Frances Byrne:

I absolutely agree. It is about having a degree of flexibility. We all hear self-employed parents on the airwaves saying they were back in work within a week. Our members and parents tell us that the childminder, provider or staff in a crèche are often a lifeline during the first year, and it is not always about going back to work. It is about the relationship, particularly if they have an older child in the crèche. It becomes a family support. We need to value that and hold onto it for families who may be in crisis or where people are making a choice. We have to get to the stage where the system is child and family-centred, as the other contributors have said. It was a caveat about automatically going down the road where there would only be places in crèches for one-year-olds up, for all those reasons.