Ms Teresa Heeney:

I will answer a couple and Ms Byrne might pick up a couple of them as well. Senator Seery Kearney's welcoming of the five-year plan and the development of a roadmap is great to hear. I will not go over what Ms Clarke already said but as we understand, the programme board for the single agency has been appointed and continues to meet. Planning is certainly under way. There is an event shortly bringing together people involved in early childhood care and education, ECCE. As to where it is at in terms of a plan, we would not have the answer to that.

I would like to come in on the issue of developers. Ms Clarke is absolutely right. We can develop all kinds of buildings in all kinds of places but if we cannot find the staff, they are literally white elephants. With regard to the current arrangements, however, it may be useful for the committee to know that developers still do have to build. Where there are 75 houses, they still have to build a crèche. However, on the face of it, that might seem clear and transparent, but what we hear from members of Early Childhood Ireland is that they are often not built on time. They are often left to the very end of the development of an estate. Parents are already in the house and they are not able to find a place. They can quite often be in a poor location within an estate, which adds considerable time to the start and end of a day for families. In addition, we hear that the cost of the purchase or lease of those buildings is very often very prohibitive. It could be upwards of €1 million for just a shell. Small, independent providers simply are not going to find a bank that will give them €1 million to access that. That really impacts on the offer.

We certainly have discussed with Government whether the local authority should have a role in acquiring those premises and then engaging with stakeholders and the existing community and private providers locally who may be able to extend their existing offering to roll out those services. In addition to this, locally, and this is the irony, in areas where builders are building new developments, access to schools then becomes a premium. We would hear quite regularly from members of Early Childhood Ireland who may have run a preschool service in a room of a school, but because the school now needs to take that room for educational purposes and because early years is not considered educational purposes within the Act, they are being asked to leave the school. The school loses the early years setting and the early years setting certainly cannot afford to go to this other place, so it causes a real problem in areas of high demographic growth. There is definitely a role for the State in that challenging situation.

Ms Clarke's point is well made with regard to the Senator's question about the access and inclusion model, AIM. In early years, we have a qualified workforce and very many of them have participated in inclusion training offered by the Leadership for Inclusion, LINC, programme. That workforce is very attractive to schools as special needs assistants, so we lose our workforce to the primary school system on an ongoing basis in these other support roles.