Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I commend my colleague, Deputy Funchion, on bringing forward this very important motion. One thing on which we can probably all agree is that childcare costs are out of control, particularly in areas of high demand. The average cost of childcare for working families is astronomical in my constituency and it will be the same in the Minister's because we share a similar part of the city.

The average cost of childcare for a single year can be €11,000, and, in some instances, families could be paying as much as €15,000 for a single child. That same single person or couple could be also renting. Their average rent could be €22,000 per year and, of course, we have recently seen the rising costs of heating and petrol, and many other aspects of life where the cost of living crisis is just heaping huge burdens on working people.

What are the consequences of that? Increasingly, young people are putting off family formation. They are putting off moving out on their own with their partners or by themselves and having their own children, not because they do not want to have children but because the costs are simply too great. We must, therefore, accept that our childcare model is broken and we must move towards a fully public model, just as we have with primary and secondary education and just as other European jurisdictions have done.

Our over-reliance on the private sector model exclusively to provide people's childcare needs has to end. The kinds of practical, credible and fully costed solutions put forward by my colleague, Deputy Funchion, would mean the cost of childcare would start to fall. People would have greater access to childcare where the workers are better paid and the quality of the early years education is better for everybody. I urge the Minister to listen to the practical alternatives we are putting forward and help working families get access to affordable childcare in order that people can have the quality of life they require and, where they are working, their children can have the quality of early years education they rightly deserve.

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