Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Funchion for putting down this motion. As has been said, it is timely in the context of the children going back to school in September and we have the issue of childcare in crisis throughout the country, it has to be said. That is the reality people are facing.

I listened to much of the debate. I do not in any way doubt the sincerity of the Minister or anyone in the Department who is trying to deliver this, but the system is broken. There is a difficulty here that is not being acknowledged and is not being overcome.

Recently, a constituent spoke to me. The couple moved to Leitrim from another part of the country and they do not have a family network around them. They have three children. She has worked for the past ten years in a local accountancy firm and she has given up work recently because of two issues. The first is childcare. She has two children who are in preschool and childcare costs have gone up. The second issue is that the other child, who is four years old and is going to primary school, for the first year has no school. The child cannot get the bus. They have to drive the child to school. Adding those two together, she said she cannot continue working and she just stopped working. That is not good for our society. We have a system where we have services we are meant to provide that are supposed to activate people so that they can be contributing, be part of our community and make a positive contribution. It is also better for the children that they would be going on the school bus, for climate change and all kinds of other reasons, and indeed for the children in preschool education, with all the benefits and advantages. This is not only a childminding service so that parents can go to work. It provides a significant advantage for the children who are engaged there in the system of education which is in place along with the skills that are brought to bear by the talented workforce who are hugely underpaid in all of that sector.

My party has looked at this in three ways. First, we have the issue that the costs are clearly too high for many families and we want to see a situation where they would be reduced by two thirds to the 2002 level. I have heard other speakers mention that we need to move towards a system where we would have a public childcare service, just as we have a public education service which is free at the point of entry. Certainly, we are not opposed to that. That is the direction of travel it needs to go in, but we also have budget constraints right now that we need to look at. We also have to recognise we are in a cost-of-living crisis and that has a bearing on the childcare providers as well. Their heating bills, electricity bills and all of their costs have gone up, and yet the only way they can try to make a living is to charge more of the parents of the children they are looking after and providing a service to, and that is having another impact. It is a spiral which has gone out of control. The Government needs to intervene positively and directly to ensure it can deliver for those children, for their parents, for the providers and, indeed, for the people who work in the service.

Many of those who work in the service become very disillusioned. They are there for a few years and they walk away because, they say, they have to make a living somewhere else where they will be appreciated and where they will be looked after. They do not feel they are getting that, as committed as they are to childcare practice. Many of them have studied, have got degrees and diplomas and have put a lot into this, and they turn around after it all and say they made a wrong choice and walk away. That is also an indictment of the service and the system.

On the proposals my party is putting to the Minister, I note, in his speech, the Minister mentioned a number of things. One of them was apprenticeships and employment permits and having a plan around all of that. If that is coming, I welcome it. We need to see that but, to be frank about it, we are a bit late seeing it. We should have had this quite some time ago. We should have seen this crisis coming, particularly the provision of staff in childcare services.

There are a number of questions the Minister asked in respect of that. I will leave it to my colleague to reply to the Minister. I am sure Deputy Funchion will reply to the Minister very directly in respect of those questions. That is fair enough, but the real question here is not for the Opposition. The real question here is for Government. The Government has control over this situation. The main party in government, Fine Gael, has been there for more than a decade. I do not see all its Deputies here tonight and yet we are in this crisis. There needs to be recognition of that. The Opposition has a job to do to hold those in government to account, but the Government has the job to deliver. As far as childcare is concerned in this country, it is clear that delivery has been very short.

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