Ciarán Lynch (Cork South Central, Labour)

I support the points raised by my party colleague, Deputy Kathleen Lynch, on the proposed restructuring of the child care service which will result in radical changes to the existing scheme.

Independent examination of this issue shows that additional charges will be placed upon parents. It also shows that the operational costs for community child care services will be recreated and will have to be recouped locally because of the additional costs arising from the restructured process. This will also result in a reduction of services at local level and possibly lead to the closure of numerous community child care services across the country.

Furthermore, the new process will remove the social flexibility and mobility which are currently built into the service and which are a key aspect of it, namely, that children from different income groups can come together just as they do in the primary school sector. In fact, if we applied the logic that the Minister is applying in the child care area to the primary school sector, we would see how bizarre that thinking is. It will also make it impossible to maintain standards and will undermine years of work in developing standards in this area.

The irony of all of this is that European funding and local effort have developed a good model of practice for child care in this country. This has taken community child care out of the Dark Ages, yet the Minister is now proposing to make these child care services a victim of their own success by using these measurements against them.

In effect, the Minister is proposing to create what is called — I use the terms that local community child care services propose — a ghettoisation of the service, driving out working parents on low incomes who will now be penalised by no longer being able to afford or to avail of child care in their local community.

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