Kathleen Funchion (Carlow-Kilkenny, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I will confine my comments on budget 2017 to the child care scheme. I acknowledge the Minister's efforts in terms of the early years sector and welcome some of the steps she has taken in tackling the crisis of child care costs for some families. However, we have a broken system that has been haphazardly plastered over year after year with ad hocmeasures. It is a sector which has been ignored and sidelined, resulting in a complicated system, with parents and professionals fending for themselves to the best of their abilities.

This crisis is so much more than crippling costs of child care to parents. It is a crisis of varying quality standards and a crisis in working conditions for those providing the care. Child care professionals have been doing their damnedest to maintain standards under increasingly impossible circumstances. Not unlike the treatment of nurses in the State, staff in the early child care sector, those who carry out some of the most important work for our most vulnerable citizens, continue to be treated with little or no respect. It is clear that the Government does not comprehend the scale of the crisis in the early years sector. If it did, it would have known that an extra €35.5 million is nowhere near sufficient to tackle it.

We in Sinn Féin proposed an overall package that focused on many areas within the child care sector and allocated in the region of €250 million as a first step. We proposed €111 million for a subsidisation measure that would not only assist and target those at the very low income end but would also subsidise parents who are struggling to make ends meet every month when facing crèche costs of up to €1,200 per month. Our proposal would have provided an average relief of €96 per child per week, whereas many will receive only €80 over the course of a month under the Minister's new measures. Unfortunately, the issue of quality does not seem to feature much in the Government's proposals. Our desire to see a 60% degree-led ECCE workforce by 2025 is backed by our proposal to open up the learner fund to levels 7 and 8 qualifications. This would also have benefited staff by allowing them to progress in their careers.

The elephant in the room is the crucial issue of staff pay and working conditions. We can talk all we want about the cost to parents, accessibility and quality standards, but if those who are the very backbone of the sector are burnt out, surviving on little more than minimum wage, who will be left in the sector to care for children? It is a cart-before-the-horse approach. The affordable child care subsidy announced by the Government is still based on staff earning below the living wage and signing on over the summer months for social welfare. There is no focus on the sustainability of the sector via improvements of child care professional working conditions or pay. These issues must be addressed immediately if the State expects the sector to survive. With minimum increases in the ECCE subvention, equivalent to seven days, and no increase in capitation weeks, there is a long way to go in improving working conditions. Our proposals on increasing capitation and providing an additional five weeks would have allowed for better pay and working conditions. In addition, under our proposals, all facilities seeking to avail of our early years subsidisation scheme would be required to allow the recognition of a trade union and minimum working standards and appropriate wages for their staff.

While I commend the Minister for prioritising the issue she has chosen, the truth is that parents and those working in the sector were really hoping for so much more. It comes down to investment and political choices. If we do not meaningfully engage with those working in the sector, hear what they are saying and seriously take those issues on board, the same issues will resurface year after year and the crisis in our child care sector will only deepen.

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