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

I agree with the Deputy in that this is a really positive move in terms of expanding access to AIM. It is something I and the Minister of State, Deputy Rabbitte, would have spoken about as a way to support children with a disability. As the Deputy knows, we are also bringing in the brand new equal participation model, and I think that will be seen in a number of years as being as significant as AIM in supporting children with socioeconomic disadvantage, as opposed to a disability.

We engage extremely regularly with the sector through the early years forum, where there are provider, employer, educator and parents groups all represented together. On the issue of financial reporting, which ties into what the Deputy was talking about, we are very aware there is an administrative burden there. I accept that, and it has increased. That is why, about a month ago, I announced we were doing an end-to-end review of the administrative burden on early years providers. I have allocated staff in my Department to lead that. We have done a call for engagement by representative groups from services so they can feed in their actual experience. I hope to be able to bring an action plan responding to the administrative burden, probably in quarter 2 of next year, and to start implementing that.

See this speech in context