Robert Troy (Longford-Westmeath, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

While I welcome the fact that the Government acknowledges that much progress was made during the past 15 years, during the past three years, unfortunately, the Government has pursued an anti-family agenda. Last week, the one-parent family payment cut-off was reduced to seven years of age. Of the 6,000 places available under the after-school scheme, which was introduced to alleviate this and of which we spoke last week during Question Time, only 40 have been taken up. The Government has reduced child benefit and announced it would tax maternity benefit one week after launching a report that recommends extending maternity benefit to one year.

I asked about affordability in particular. Will affordability be addressed in the early years strategy? When will the strategy be published? Has the Department started the review of the community child care subvention, CCS, and child care education and training support, CETS, schemes? While the Minister is working under tight financial constraints, the Indecon report commissioned by the Donegal County Childcare Committee puts forward three very realistic proposals that would ensure a targeted approach to ensuring affordability for middle-income and low-income families. One of these proposals was to extend the CCS scheme, which is capped and restricted to community providers. The previous Minister, Deputy Fitzgerald, agreed to review the proposal. Will the scheme be extended to private providers and will the cap be lifted? Will the Minister, with his colleague, the Minister for Social Protection, consider addressing child care through the family income supplement? We must stop paying lip service to this extremely important societal issue and introduce policies to address this critical problem.

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