Ms Moira Leydon:

Ms Ní Chéileachair has covered it. On early childhood, and Senator Flynn mentioned it earlier, it is about SNAs and respect. SIPTU's Big Start campaign, which includes Fórsa and the Irish Congress of Trade Unions more generally, is critical. We have graduates in the early childhood care and education, ECCE, sector, some of whom are graduates at master's degree level, who are being paid the minimum wage. We are now at the stage where we have the joint labour committee and improved wages will be brought in. For people who are professionals with this passion and commitment to their clients, which is what teachers are, whether they are teaching very young children or adults, pay is not everything. It is also about working conditions, career pathway and validation. It is critical to have time to grow as a professional.

One of the reasons teachers get very cranky is they are just too busy to have time to think about what they want to think about. That is particularly so in the early childhood sector where they are simply not valued. If we value pay as a mark of how much we value people, they are not valued. That is critical. In addition, they are working in privately run institutions, frequently chains, which have profit as their primary orientation. Their working conditions, including continuity of work and job security, can be very precarious and vary quite significantly throughout the country. They have a good, big union behind them, SIPTU, but I can see no territorial reasons why they would not engage with this because they are so qualified. However, I can see working condition reasons that are barriers to people staying in the sector. We talk about retention in the teaching profession. To me, there is a far greater threat of an exodus from the ECCE profession than there is from mainstream teaching at present.