Dessie Ellis (Dublin North West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State very much. Preschools are education facilities. They are no different from primary and secondary schools. Responsibility for them needs to be moved to the Department of Education and they needed to funded as education facilities with proper salary scales. For these people to be paid €20,000 less than a comparable person working in primary or secondary education is absolutely wrong.

To give the Minister of State some idea of the scale of it, some 141 preschools closed their doors in 2022, and another 42 closed this year up to June.

Preschools must build on their own. They set up without funding or help from the Government. They do not receive funding from parents and they only receive core funding. They face huge costs, including in planning, architect's fees, fireproofing and fire doors. They have no holidays, pensions or even pay during summer breaks. To give an example, the annual salary for a first-year preschool educator is €15,960. That is €14 per hour with 30 hours per week and 38 weeks of work. Compared with that, the annual salary for a first-year primary school educator is €38,637. That is for 35 hours per week and 38 weeks of work. It is no wonder preschool teachers are leaving the service. Ireland is the EU state that provides the lowest funding to early years education. We are haemorrhaging people from the sector because of the salaries. They cannot even get a mortgage because of the type of wages they are getting. It seems unfair and I wish we could look at incorporating this into the Department of Education.

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