Mr. Andy Heffernan:

They are section 39. There are different ways of funding them, but they are essentially Government-funded. We negotiate every year to increase those. The day care at home hours were a Covid offering. I think €1.7 million was made available at the time to develop that offering. That has been added to this year with an additional €480,000 and we can quantify the additional hours there.

That service has been validated through external research. We wanted to do that so it was not an offering that was only available during the Covid-19 pandemic but became embedded in the offering we provide. It has certainly been very successful and has, by and large, been funded through the Exchequer.