Olwyn Enright (Laois-Offaly, Fine Gael)

I move amendment No. 27:

In page 20, between lines 8 and 9, to insert the following:

"(3) The Minister shall, within 3 months of the commencement of this Act, lay before each House of the Oireachtas, a report on eligibility criteria for the Early Childcare Supplement.

This amendment relates to the early child care supplement. The period for which it is given was reduced by six months in the budget and the reason given was that children aged five and a half are at school. As far as I am aware the age limit at which children start school has not changed since the early child care supplement was introduced. Therefore, that is an unusual argument to make.

In regard to the package of cutbacks introduced in this legislation and in other areas, while we can look to outside economic forces, to some degree, as contributing to the current position, the forces at work within Government during the past 11 years have also contributed. Responsibility must be taken for a failure to achieve as much as we could have when money was available and for the waste of money expended across all Departments during that period. Furthermore, the way decisions were made and announced to gain the maximum political goodwill, particularly in the run up to an election, has led to some of the problems we have.

The early child care supplement was introduced without any adequate research being undertaken in this area On six separate occasions during the previous Dáil Fine Gael asked the then Taoiseach and the then Ministers for Finance, Health and Children and Social and Family Affairs, the cost of this supplement and on each occasion a different answer was given. No homework was done before this supplement was introduced. It is as if it almost came out of the blue to the Government that because the supplement was linked to child benefit, it would have to be paid to parents whose children were living abroad. This provision was introduced to assist people in meeting the cost of child care in Ireland. That difficulty for families was the expensive cost of child care provision in Ireland. As a result of its introduction, Irish parents who still have to pay for expensive child care provision are the ones who are being penalised because not enough homework was done on the reaching of a decision on this matter in the first place.

See this speech in context