Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Last week, I questioned the Tánaiste about the "Prime Time" special on the quality of services in crèches and early childhood services. We both agreed the early years are the most crucial in terms of development of children, with the most critical years being from zero to three.

Anyone who watched "Prime Time" last night, as I did, would have been shocked and concerned at the footage that RTE took in a number of crèches. It is fair to say the programme uncovered cruelty, emotional abuse, physical heavy-handedness with children being flipped and thrown on to mats, verbal abuse and exclusion of very young children. In many respects it was the very antithesis of what should happen in any early childhood care setting. There was clear evidence of gross mismanagement of these centres. There was a fundamental abuse of the trust parents place in the management of these services. There was evidence of fraudulent recording of attendances to fulfil the requirements for funding under the preschool year and there were clear breaches of preschool regulations.

It emerged that 75% of all child care services nationally were in breach of regulations in 2012 and 48% of crèches were in breach of adult to child ratios during inspection. Would the Taoiseach ask the Minister if, in retrospect, it was a good idea to increase the preschool ratio from 10:1 to 11:1?

Fundamentally, there is an issue surrounding the extent and quality of the inspection regime itself. We still have no inspectors in five of the local health office areas of the HSE: Dublin south city, Sligo-Leitrim, Louth, Cavan and north Monaghan. The quality of the inspection is compliance-based as opposed to development-based and the model has been called into question.

We were promised the Children First legislation and I hear it might not be ready before the end of the session. There is an onus on the Oireachtas, having witnessed what we saw last night, to work collectively to ensure two elements of legislation that were promised over the past 12 to 18 months are accelerated as a response to the situation - the Children First Bill and the child and family agency. We are willing to have an all-party committee approach, which we had before in the 1990s during the first Child Care Act and was a breakthrough at the time. This is a wake up call for anyone who is concerned about this area. We are willing to co-operate to ensure the Children First legislation is brought through the House as quickly as possible. When can we expect that Bill to come before the House and to be fully enacted into law?

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