Duncan Smith (Dublin Fingal, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to discuss early years education in the Chamber this evening. Unfortunately, for those of us who are serious about a publicly provided system of early years education, this motion does not meet the vision of that goal. This motion from Sinn Féin, and the confusing and contrary contributions we have heard so far, do not speak to where the early years education debate is in this country at the moment. The debate is within households, such as my own, who are in the midst of early years education, including the payment and finding of it and everything else, and it is about a publicly provided childcare system.

We were told the motion is new. The €10 per day childcare per child is not new. The Labour Party has been calling for a €200 per month cap, and 20 days multiplied by €10 is €200. We have been calling for that for years. That is not new. As to it being visionary, while extending parents’ leave and benefit schemes is important, that can be included among many different motions in many different areas.

Increasing the pay for early years educators is vitally important. We have a system in place now to do that, in fairness to the Minister, with the joint labour committee system. The Minister is not getting away because there are problems to which I will come.

We are in the last knockings of this Dáil. We need to be talking about where early years education needs to be going. On this side of the Chamber, we have heard about publicly funded childcare. There is a difference between publicly funded and publicly provided childcare. There is a split in the Government on this. The Minister has spoken about publicly provided childcare and early years education, which is where we need to go. Listening to Deputy Alan Farrell on "Drivetime" debating with Deputy Kerrane a few days ago, he was talking about publicly funded early years education. Publicly funded can mean the sustaining of the existing private model with public funds. That is what this motion, in essence, is calling for. It is not explicitly calling for a publicly provided early years education model.

It is not just parties like the Labour Party that are calling for this. Tomorrow, the National Women’s Council of Ireland, along with 30 alliance organisations, will be outlining and detailing a truly visionary plan for early years education. It is amazing that plan is not included in the motion.

We need a not-for-profit public system in which all investment directly benefits children, education and care, a system that starts whenever parents need it and includes high quality school-age childcare that is accessible and available to all children, including children with additional needs, children living in rural areas and children living in disadvantaged areas, and ensures decent pay and working conditions for our early years educators. Our early years educators need to be considered, paid and treated like our primary and secondary school teachers and educators in every other part of our publicly provided system. We need a system that combines public childcare provision with better pay and longer family leave, giving parents real choice in caring for their children and work-life balance.

The Labour Party supports the roll-out of a universal public model of early years education, to be developed initially through the education and training boards which will provide community early years services with a guaranteed place for every single child. We can also introduce an early years in situ scheme for the State to take over providers that are exiting the market – and it is a market at the moment because it is provided, in the main, by private operators. We know operators are saying they are leaving the market. We submitted parliamentary questions in this regard. While there are providers leaving the market, it is maybe not to the level ISME and others would have us believe. For any provider that leaves the market, the State should be in a position to purchase it to keep the workers on, allow them to become State employees and begin to move towards a properly publicly provided childcare and early years model.

I want the Minister to look at the example of Donabate in Fingal, north County Dublin and. Fingal is a local authority area on which the Minister and I both sat at more or less at the same time. It has the lowest level of community early years provision in the country. Some 6% of crèches in Fingal are community or not-for-profit compared with the 26% country-wide average. As the Minister knows, Fingal is the youngest local authority area in the State. That is wrong. If people go into an area like Donabate, where the Minister for housing, Deputy O'Brien, has staked his reputation on providing housing, they will see houses being built in the small village, which is becoming a large village in north County Dublin, but they will not see the provision of early years education or facilities in any way, shape or form. If people go to any door in any estate that is relatively new or has been built in recent years, this issue will come up. Person after person will say they do not have a crèche place.

This issue happened before and it is happening again right now. The Government has run out of time to deal with it because we are going to have an election soon. We need to make sure that in Donabate and other areas where houses are being built, as few as they are, we are providing early childcare facilities. In a local authority like Fingal, where the provision of publicly funded community, not-for-profit early years facilities is so low, we have a great opportunity to run a proper model and get in quickly. There are publicly owned sites and land banks there. There are developers on site that can build, on behalf of the State, the crèches and childcare facilities that need to be provided. If this does not happen, Donabate will become another example of what we had in the late 1990s and early 2000s, that is, house building without the services, crèches, schools and trains. We can go down the list but we are talking about early years childcare provision tonight. I am asking the Minister to look at this issue because this is a serious crisis and one that is, unfortunately, repeating itself.

The Minister had a good rattle with his amendment to this motion. As the Minister knows, I am not happy with the motion, but the record of the Minister and the Government on this will be mixed. He has said he has turned the dial. That will only be proved if, from this moment, we actually see the next Government move towards a publicly provided early years education model and we move away from subsidising mass private providers. We are going to continue with everyone being unhappy, with workers and parents paying too much, a lack of places, children being left at home and parents - the majority of whom are mothers as it is heavily gendered - not being able to go back to work.

We would then have providers exiting the system. A publicly provided service is the way forward. Unfortunately, the Government has not done that yet. The next Government will have to. This motion put forward by Sinn Féin certainly does not call for that either. Unfortunately, it is just a few extras to the system that currently exists. I will leave it at that.

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