Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein)

Ba mhaith liom tacú ar son Sinn Féin leis an rún in ainm na dTeachtaí Fhine Gael ar chúram leanaí, sampla eile é den bpraiseach atá déanta ag an Rialtas seo ar pholasaí poiblí fíor-thábhacthach.

On behalf of the Sinn Féin Teachtaí Dála, I support this motion in the name of the Fine Gael Deputies. It is timely and necessary to highlight the issue of child care which, regrettably, has received relatively little attention recently and which has been almost lost among the many other public policy disasters perpetrated by this Fianna Fáil-Green Party Government.

Having failed to put in place a proper child care infrastructure during the past decade, the Government announced the preschool year in early childhood care and education scheme. As the motion states, the scheme has not been properly explained, seems ill thought-out and certainly appears to be undeliverable by the start of 2010, as promised. I hope the Minister will address that specific issue at some length and with some certainty.

The announcement of the scheme accompanied one of the Government's many savage cuts, that is, the withdrawal of the early child care supplement which was supposed to make up for the very poor State provision of child care. Sinn Féin, over a series of pre-budget submissions, had argued that Government needed to properly address the clear requirement of State provided early child care provision. Time after time, regrettably, the Government has failed to heed that appeal and the appeals of many non-governmental organisations which have been lobbying in this regard over many years.

That poor provision over which this Government has presided was confirmed embarrassingly for everyone on 11 December last when UNICEF issued a report which found that this State came last in a league table of the 25 OECD countries in terms of provision of early childhood education and care. That was a damning indictment of the Government's policy on child care.

This is a direct result of Government neglect over the past decade. I have no doubt this will be seen as one of the greatest policy failures by this series of Fianna Fáil-led Governments since 1997 and during the so-called Celtic tiger years when they refused to put in place high-standard care and early education accessible to all children.

In the very week the UNICEF report came out, parents, children and child care workers were forced to protest in Dublin and Cork at the Government's community child care subvention scheme. The ill-conceived scheme has created divisions between children from families who receive social welfare payments and children from families who do not. It is inadequate to fund community child care and many crèches are closing as a result, something I have witnessed in my constituency. Crèches have been burdened with bureaucracy to administer the scheme. The Government has failed to address the disgracefully low pay of child care workers in the community sector. This glaring need must be addressed.

Last September the Dublin inner-city partnership and the Dublin inner-city child care providers network published a critical study of the effects of the community child care subvention scheme which reflects the experience of child care providers throughout the country. Of the 12 child care providers studied in the research, seven, or 58%, saw their funding increase on their average annual grant under the previous scheme, the equal opportunities child care programme, and five saw their funding reduced. Those whose funding was reduced experienced the equivalent of a 4.8% reduction in 2008 from the average annual grant level provided under the EOCP. The study found that community child care providers who experienced reductions in funding in 2008 would continue to have their funding reduced to 85% of their 2007 level in 2009 and further reduced to 75% of the 2007 level in 2010.

It was found, most critically, that child care providers no longer have discretionary power to provide for the most needy cases. That merits emphasis because that discretion is critical in being able to respond to specific cases of hardship which we all must realise and recognise are in every constituency. If we are doing our work as Dáil representatives, we will know the cases concerned and we must use the opportunity to press Government to restore some measure of discretion in order that the most needy of cases are properly addressed.

The implementation of the scheme was found to be cumbersome. Given that subvention payments are paid forward based on enrolments in previous years, projects are now no longer able to plan in a coherent and business-like fashion for the subsequent year. Some 58% of projects were worried there would be an impact on quality of services for children and families. It is stated in the report:

There is a real risk that services will close. Local people in some of the most disadvantaged communities may not be able to afford childcare. Some of the most vulnerable families will be affected, and some families who struggled the hardest to get themselves out of poverty and into employment are very likely to lose their support. Vulnerable children, will lose their valuable access to preschool education and care. Working parents may see increases in childcare fees ranging from 50% increase to 166% increase over 2007 costs.

That report surely must be a wake-up call for the Government.

The report highlighted the low wages and salaries in community child care in comparison with other similar employments and found that implementation of the scheme would result in reduction of job security for community child care workers. Given that experience, is it any wonder people are sceptical about the latest announcement from Government in regard to child care? The community child care subvention scheme caused huge confusion when first introduced and, clearly, the problems about which the Government was warned came to pass.

We now have this latest addition to the tattered patchwork of child care provision in this State. In place of that patchwork, we need a new approach based on the rights of children to the best care and on the needs of parents for adequate child care so that they can avail of their rights to education, training and employment to sustain themselves and their families.

We in Sinn Féin have set out our vision of how the State should address the vital issue of child care and we have submitted our proposals repeatedly in a series of pre-budget submissions over the years in which we have focused on the need for child care and on child care provision as a critical area almost as important in terms of family budgets as the provision of home itself.

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