Denis Naughten (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this Bill and thank the Minister for being present. I welcome the legislation. It is a very positive development. It is a response from Government on foot of the campaign that was run last year for the extension of maternity leave for women who were on such leave when Covid-19 initially kicked in. They had been losing out on part of the maternity leave and this provision was introduced in response to the impact of Covid-19 on families. I welcome the provision as a result of that, it is a positive development. The extension of paternity leave up to five weeks for each parent will be of huge benefit to many parents. The longer term plan is to extend it to seven weeks in coming years. When he responds, I ask the Minister to elaborate on why provision has not been made in the legislation to extend it beyond the five weeks by statutory instrument if the Government intends to increase the leave further in the years ahead rather than having to come back and introduce new primary legislation. There will be support right across the House for that were it the Government's intention. Intention is one thing, legislation is something very different. We have the legislation before us. Surely now is the time to deal with that.

Covid-19 has highlighted many issues in the childcare sector. For front-line staff, whether in healthcare or those in shops, other public services or vital private services, childcare has been a vast problem over the past 12 months. While there has been some tinkering at the edges of this, there has effectively been a table tennis match between the Minister, the Minister for Education and the Minister for Health, with no one prepared to grapple with this issues for front-line staff who have been left in a very difficult situation of trying to juggle childcare while also delivering vital front-line services in our health sector and communities at the same time. It is to be hoped we are seeing light at the end of the tunnel on this particular variant of this virus but that should not be a reason to ignore the fundamental problem of the delivery of vital childcare services for front-line workers. We need to put a far more robust system in place.

That is one side of this issue. Many of us attended the protest in Dublin last year about the terms and conditions under which many childcare workers in Ireland work. I have spoken about this in the House before. Staff in shops who pack shelves with baby wipes are paid more than qualified childcare workers who use those very same baby wipes in crèches and childcare facilities. There is something fundamentally wrong if the people who we charge with and on whom we put a huge level of responsibility in minding and educating our children, who play such a vital role in their development at a very early stage in life, are paid less than someone stacking shelves in a supermarket. That needs to change. The Minister has spoken of a new funding model for the childcare sector and examining its workforce development, but we need to move from report after report into action.

If we want to use a pilot for the living wage, the childcare sector is an important place to start. It could be a very useful template.

We have all seen in the last 12 months how important the childcare sector is to a long-term sustainable economy. We are not going to have a sustainable sector in that area, however, unless we have proper pay and terms and conditions for the staff working in it. As staff gain experience and qualifications, we have seen that they move out of the sector and take their education and training with them. A great deal of investment has been put into that training and education by the people concerned, their employers and the State, and yet they move out of that sector and into probably a completely different area. The result is a loss of knowledge and that skill base and this is leading to many childcare facilities having ongoing struggles with proper staffing ratios. Prior to the onset of Covid-19, many such service providers told me about the difficulties they were experiencing with recruitment.

Before I finish, I come back to the fundamental basis of this legislation, which is to support young families and address our existing childcare challenges. We must look at this matter in far more comprehensive terms and not just at preschool services but also at the provision of after-school services for many parents. We must also look at this issue from an economic perspective and in the long-term sustainability of our economy. Female participation in the workforce must be increased and more women must be encouraged to move up the payscales and management structures in our businesses and organisations in the public and private sectors. They can only do that if they have access to reliable and cost-effective childcare, which does not exist now.

Turning to our older people at the other end of the spectrum, the Joint Committee on Social Protection provided a detailed submission to the Commission on Pensions. In that document, the committee made reference to the issue of the birth rate in Ireland. It is not as stark a problem here as it is in many other European countries. Many of those countries, however, have put in place extensive supports for young couples and families to help them rear their children from an early age. We can look at the best practices in some of those other European countries and learn from some of the mistakes they made. Rather than waiting for this issue to become a crisis for our economy in the longer term, let us support families today. Let us start putting targeted supports in place now and not start panicking in ten or 20 years about a situation which may by then have gone beyond the point of no return. Now is the time to learn from what is happening in other European countries.

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