Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Higgins. I had a couple of statistics ready for Deputy Richmond in terms of his constituency. For Deputy Higgins's own interest, in south Dublin, where her constituency is, we have an 87% take up of core funding. It is a little less than the national average but still a very strong take up.

As I was saying to Deputy Funchion earlier, when we introduced core funding we saw it very much as supporting the wages of childcare professionals. Deputy Higgins set out how 73% of childcare professionals, or 25,000 childcare professionals, will see pay increases because of the pay agreement this Government brought in. However, another key extra bonus of core funding is an increase in capacity. We are seeing capacity increase from what it was in 2019. We are seeing it where we really need it, that is, in the baby rooms and in the toddler rooms, the under ones and the under threes, respectively, where we had a real under supply. That is because they are more expensive and core funding is giving services more money to support the higher ratios of staff in those rooms.

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