Katherine Zappone (Dublin South West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I appreciate the Deputy's question and the way my Department has answered it. The issue of capacity is consistently monitored, particularly by the city and county child care committees. I am not aware of any specific capacity concerns. If the Deputy has a specific capacity concern, she should bring it to the attention of my Department and the city and county child care committees. There is ongoing monitoring and we are not concerned at this stage. The reply by the Department identified the number of three to five year olds in the population and the number of places that will be available. As I have already said, they do not necessarily correlate. There may be some whose parents choose to send them to school early rather than spending a second year in preschool.

The Deputy's other question was that if we are concerned about capacity, do we have plans for capital investment in 2018. The answer is that we do.

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