Liam Twomey (Wexford, Fine Gael)

No matter what the Minister of State, Deputy Brian Lenihan, said, there are huge deficits in the provision of child care, child welfare and the education of our children. When the Disability Bill goes through this House we will see how bad are these weaknesses in the system.

It is impossible for me to consider all the issues raised tonight, but two have stood out clearly since I was elected to Dáil Éireann. They are the equal opportunities child care programme, which has been a fantastic success, and the VTOS child care supports. Sometimes I believe the Government has no social conscience. It sets up these excellent social programmes for children and parents, yet when they are barely established it seems it is hell-bent on tearing them down again. That is often the impression of many of the people who benefit from these schemes.

Some people say the Government is pathologically or at least psychologically unable to consider the Swedish, Finnish, Danish or any other socially progressive child care model. There is a mindset which sees a need to support the schemes I have mentioned for only three years or less, with the schemes then expected to support themselves. Many schemes are supposed to become businesslike in that space of time and raise the funds to keep going. These are social programmes for looking after child care issues. Many other countries have such programmes as a norm. They do not view them as something special to be brought to a community for three or four years before being dismantled. They should be built on. In my constituency I have seen hard work put into such schemes, yet they are not funded by the Government in a way that would allow them develop and become stronger. No matter what we say about EU or Government funding, the Government does not seem committed to child care schemes but presumes it can extract the maximum work from parents and forget about what is coming for the next generation.

We have exploited the Celtic generation and now we are letting down what we might call the Celtic cubs. In the past seven years to which the Government regularly refers, since 1997 or so, many people in this country have made between €50 million and €500 million, yet we are letting down the people who sustained the progress for this country during those years. It is time the Government faced up to these important responsibilities. Vital funding is wasted with people having to go through a maze of bureaucracy when reapplying for funds. They have to go to four or five different organisations for pre-approval and post-approval and whatever further layers are required for people to get funding for systems which are up and running and working well.

Parents also suffer huge anxiety as the Government fails to decide whether it wants to look after the child care needs of the next generation of children. If we have forced people out to work because of our tax policies and the way we have run the economy, the least we can do is deliver a proper child care system to the people left at home.

Many of the aims mentioned here tonight are achievable. Some will be dismissed immediately by many of those on the Government benches because the Government finds it hard to accept even the most basic programmes such as the equal opportunities child care programme. It certainly would find it difficult to accept the VTOS child care supports because it has attempted to dismantle them so quickly after they were set up. It is odd how such things happen immediately after an election. Now that we are facing into another period of crisis for the Government, we will surely hear a great deal more about these schemes again. That is not the way to look after the child care needs of this generation, whether those of single mothers who would like to go out to work or get an education, single fathers who would like to get support in looking after their children or would like to further their education, or the cases we are seeing more often where both parents are expected to go out to work. Often they are not going to work to pay off big mortgages but to maintain a basic standard of living because in the past seven to ten years there have been huge cost increases for even the most basic commodities. These people are forced out to work and are merely trying to maintain a standard of living they might have had 15 years ago.

We must wake up to what child care provision, child welfare, child education and child health issues mean. We will leave it to the Government parties to see if they can come up with something better in their amendments than what we have seen so far this evening.

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