Ivana Bacik (Dublin Bay South, Labour)
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I thank all the witnesses for their presentations. I congratulate Ms Smith on her wonderful achievement as well. It is great to hear about, and I appreciate her sharing her personal story as well. It is powerful for all of us.

I also want to focus on the issue of childcare. Ms Ward put it strongly in respect of saying that the single most important metric or measure that can be adopted to bring children out of poverty is to have a quality system of childcare. We are grappling with how we can go about doing that. We heard from all the witnesses in this regard, and as Ms Byrne said, the national childcare scheme was supposed to offer a pathway to a Scandinavian model of childcare. The flaws in it, however, as identified by Ms Bayliss and Ms Smith, and by others, and highlighted by my colleague, Senator Sherlock, have really undermined its effectiveness and have made it counterproductive in many ways. We see siblings from the same family having different measures of support, etc.

What I want to do is to ask the witnesses about their view on the funding model the Government is proposing. We in the Labour Party have been putting forward the idea of a universal public childcare scheme, and the Government is moving in that direction too. The Minister recently spoke in the budget about moving to a new funding model in September. We are starting from a situation where childcare provision has a heavy reliance on private providers and the overall system is piecemeal, fragmented and complex to navigate, as the witnesses described.

How do we get to the point of a universal public childcare system? Is there a system that does what we are considering? I recently looked at Berlin childcare models, which are very interesting in that they are community run but State funded. Ms Byrne and I have discussed how we can get to the point where there would be still local engagement and local governance of childcare but also State funding. I have called for a Donogh O'Malley moment such as what was done in the case of secondary education, whereby every child would be guaranteed a childcare place that the State would pay for but that would be provided locally. I would love to hear any ideas or thoughts our guests may have from their work and experience as to how we can get to that point.