Arthur Morgan (Louth, Sinn Fein)

I support the amendment. Child care is one of the areas of Government failure. I do not merely throw that comment across the floor to score a political point. The critical issue for families is for them to secure a reduction in their child care costs, as this cost is equivalent to a second mortgage. The difficulty is to find a way to achieve a reduction in this cost. There are a number of options available to the Government. It should perhaps have invested in facilities and made those available to people to run child care facilities. There were many more imaginative approaches that could have been taken outside, apart even from CE schemes, that would have helped facilitate the reduction of child care costs and the provision to parents of far greater access to child care.

There is more to the issue than just child care. I agree with the comment of the previous speaker, Deputy Lynch, on exposing a child to interaction with his or her peers, which is important, but the lack of child care facilities is preventing enterprise, blocking talent in the home and hindering people who could otherwise become entrepreneurs and provide significant job opportunities to society. It is unfortunate that those people are being hindered in that way.

Society has changed as a result of the dispersal of people from Dublin and other cities throughout the State to areas such as my own in County Louth or the adjoining counties of Meath and so on. The extended family support, with which we are all familiar, is no longer available to people to allow them utilise that traditional source of child care, which very often was the parents or the grandparents of the householders. That is a major difficulty for people trying to deal with this important matter.

I do not heap responsibility for that on the Minster's shoulders. That is not my intention. It is a Government failure that the critical area of not only our society's development but our economic development was blind-sided and major opportunities were missed. I look forward to the day when a Government, sooner rather than later, will recognise the importance of the issue and deal with it comprehensively because a comprehensive impact is required to lessen the burden I have described. I support the amendment.

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