Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

When the Minister moved the amendment he painted a very rosy picture, and why would he not? Anybody who saw the demonstration last week outside the Dáil, which was not by a long shot only providers as there were hundreds of workers there, and listened to parents would have to recognise that there is a crisis in our childcare system. Many crèches have closed. The Minister said the closures are slowing down this year but crèches have closed. In the communities where they have closed they are gone forever. Childcare workers are leaving the system because the rates of pay are so low and their skills are not being recognised. Many parents are crippled by childcare costs and the oppressive financial burden of the spiralling cost of living.

The childcare model is broken. The Government subsidises small and medium companies. Some crèche owners report they feel handcuffed by the amount of paperwork needed to apply for the subsidies. On the other hand, parents are constantly worrying that the costs will rise further. Childcare workers know their skills and their contribution to this very important job are not being properly recognised.

In my area crèches have been closing down, including Linders, St. Michael's in Ballyfermot and the naíonra in Inchicore. These are very important locations for parents to be able to access childcare. They are gone and they are not coming back. There is no doubt that some private companies are struggling but we do not know exactly how many. Deputy Whitmore referred to the largest childcare operators in the State and I want to back up what she has said. The Giraffe company saw its profits rise in 2020 by a staggering 61% to €3.5 million. This is not something that we want to see in the provision of an essential service. It paid out a lot of money to its shareholders after the State subsidised it during Covid. It is late filing its accounts for 2021 but it did attempt in Dublin 8 to increase its costs twice in recent years. I had to make representations to the office of the Minister to intervene to make sure it did not happen.

Almost two thirds of all early years services are privately owned and the remainder are community-based services that are not for profit. Thousands of workers on low pay are not compensated for their skills and most services operate at capacity with long waiting lists. Access to these services is getting more and more difficult and fees for parents are way too high.

I want to speak on the amendment that I cannot move, which states that we believe the Sinn Féin motion, although welcome, does not go far enough. It is limited and says nothing about moving to a publicly funded childcare system. We wanted to make an amendment to state we should immediately move to a publicly owned and funded national childcare service, free at the point of use, where childcare workers are employed as public sector workers with pay and benefit on a scale in line with teachers. We propose this move as something we would transition to immediately. We need a statement from the Government that it will provide childcare free at the point of use so there is no discrimination against workers or parents, regardless of how marginalised or poor they are or how much they can afford it.

The Minister is probably aware of the National Women's Council of Ireland's publication in which it calls for a similar model. It points out that one in three women who leave their jobs do so because of the high childcare costs, and that rises to a staggering 60% among lone parents. The amendment to the motion that we and the National Women's Council of Ireland called for was also called for by the Citizens' Assembly on Gender Equality and the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child. It is a model that many EU countries employ. Many do not, but Ireland still remains one of the most expensive places to access childcare in the EU, like many other things. We have a pre-budget submission to be published on Friday. We tabled many questions on this and the costs of doing it will be detailed in that submission. I will not go into them here but those details are important.

The lack of affordable and accessible childcare is a real barrier for parents, communities and children themselves. Early years education is the single biggest barrier to women participating fully in life and in work. I say "women" because we are still left with a gender imbalance in care duties, whether they are paid or unpaid. Early years education should be seen as a public good and a vital public service and as an investment in children, not a commodity or something that makes profit. We would not tolerate a hodgepodge of various private and sometimes community-owned funding streams going to our four-, five- and six-year-olds in national and primary school, so why do we tolerate it when they are that bit younger? In fact, if education was fully free and State-run, it would be a huge plus to our society as a whole. All the sociological surveys and reports show that the more we invest in children at a younger age, the better the outcomes in life for the economy, our citizens and everybody in our State as a whole. Everyone, regardless of their income or how marginalised they are, should have access to quality and free childcare. We would have liked to have moved our amendment. We are not able to move it because the Minister has moved the Government amendment but nevertheless, that policy is very important and needs to be promoted. We would like to see the Government move towards that in the future.

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