Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

The figures are €638 million this year and €1 billion by 2028. These are inadequate sums. Families are spending 34% of household income on childcare, compared with 3% in Austria and 6% in Sweden, and that is despite childcare workers in many cases earning just the minimum wage. There is a crisis and the Government proposes, basically, to go back to normal. UNICEF recommends that spending on childcare and early childhood education should be equivalent to 1% of GDP. Given our inflated GDP, we might instead use GNI*, but €638 million represents just one third of 1% of GNI. Even €1 billion by 2028, and who knows whether we will ever get there, is still substantially short. It would need to be €1.8 billion to reach 1% of GNI*. The Government is failing the country's children, something that will leave them disadvantaged for life. At the very least, we should have a commitment to a national childcare service and to increasing funding to 1% of GNI*.

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