Bertie Ahern (Dublin Central, Fianna Fail)

In this case I am talking about people in the workforce. Some 800,000 people are now working. The reason the Government decided to go the child benefit route the last time was that there was no agreement by the representative organisations as to how this could be done both for people who were in the workforce and for those working in the home. For that reason the Government decided the fairest way was to move from child benefit of €38 to the current rate of €141 which was an enormous increase. I will not go into the history of how small increases were in the past but we gave an enormous increase in child benefit from €500 million to €2 billion.

Child benefit is child care. It is money to help people whether they are working in the home or outside of it. I do not think one can discriminate between people working at home and those in the workplaces. It would be putting one against the other and that would be the wrong thing to do. We have already improved parental leave. A number of initiatives are in place in my Department to support the needs of a diverse workforce, including work sharing options, flexi-time, career breaks, paternity leave, term leave, special leave for domestic circumstances, adoptive leave and carer's leave. All of these are in operation in my Department. I support them all and their extension. I agree with whatever helps a person to pursue his or her career in a proper way.

Under the equal opportunities child care scheme we have gone from a position of zero to a network of community non-profit crèches. These have got both capital and costs of up to €499 million to provide 26,000 child care places — at maximum capacity there will be 38,000 or 39,000 places. All of these things are necessary. Officials across Departments have looked at all the best models, which are considered to be in Finland and Sweden. Finland appears to come out No. 1 in Europe. We have looked at the models to see what we could achieve over a number of years now that we have improved child benefit. I would like if we could move to deal with some of these issues. Seven issues have been identified and the interdepartmental group has suggested that we should pursue one or two of them. We are looking at those to see what we can do to at least get the process started.

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