Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire (Cork South Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

There is any amount of things I could touch upon but I have not much time. I shall just focus on two points that I have raised previously with the Minister. First is the category of young people who are leaving care, an issue that is very often forgotten. It is my firm and long held view that there is not adequate support for young people leaving care. There is a statutory entitlement to an after-care plan but that is just a plan on a piece of paper. I believe there needs to be a statutory right to after care. I realise there are recruitment and retention issues for workers in this regard, but it is badly needed. These young people have already been failed on several occasions in their lives and the least they deserve is a good, well supported transition into adulthood. I am afraid this is not happening currently.

My second point is on childcare. I believe we have come at it in a very piecemeal way in recent years. We need to have a vision of where we are going to get to a place where childcare is provided as a right, where it is a public service provided by a well remunerated and well supported workforce providing quality, early years education and care. To achieve that we have to get away from the constant approach of providing piecemeal subsidies on different bits and pieces of schemes. I am aware that they are being rolled into one as part of the affordable childcare scheme but I do not believe that this is the right route ultimately. We need to work towards the way education is provided in schools through the Department of Education and Skills. We need to provide childcare as a public service. It cannot be done in the unsustainable way that we have been doing it. The Minister said that childcare workers can organise and try to get a sectoral employment order, SEO, but I do not think that is good enough. The childcare schemes devised by the Department are based on calculations that acknowledge that the wages paid to childcare workers are inadequate and unsustainable. If we are to build a reasonable childcare system worthy of the supposed prosperous country that Ireland is, we need to invest in the wages of childcare workers, develop sustainable community and publicly funded services that can provide a quality service to all. We will not achieve that if we keep pursuing the approach of providing subsidies to private providers in the community. While the subsidies are good they will not, ultimately, give us the sustainable basis.

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