Jennifer Whitmore (Wicklow, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I thank Sinn Féin for bringing this motion forward. It is always important to be able to discuss childcare provision and early education in this Chamber. Interestingly, in the past half hour I had a conversation with a young parent. He told me about his personal experience of getting childcare. He spoke about the stress of trying to find places and pay for them, the stress of getting children there and making sure they have aftercare. It brought me right back to that sick feeling that just sits in your stomach when you know you have to organise this for you own family and, if you do not, the repercussions of it. It may mean you cannot work or that you have to consider whether you can afford to go back to work, if that is your choice. It is a sad state of affairs that we are probably having the same conversations now that we would have been having ten years or 15 year ago. I acknowledge that the Government has invested a lot more than previous governments in the area of early education, but I do not think it has worked to the extent it should have, considering the amount of public money that has gone into it. Not a week goes by without a parent in my constituency talking to me about this. Recently, one woman, even though she had signed up for and paid for a crèche for her child a year in advance, when she went to take up that place in August, was told it would not be available until August of next year. She is a teacher, so she could not go back to her teaching job. The impacts of this can be seen throughout society. If we do not get this right for parents, children and childcare workers, we do not get it right for society in total.

The reason the investment and the focus put on it by the Minister has not worked to date is because the model is completely wrong. We are expecting a private system to provide a public good. Ultimately, in a private system, the responsibility of companies is to their shareholders and to make money. They do not align with the needs of our children or their families. While this motion is welcome, I too was surprised and disappointed to see no mention or reflection of the public provision in it, with the State providing that fundamental service. I recognise there is an immediate need to reduce costs for parents. This debate is indicative of the same discussion we have been having for decades. It is really one centred about how we can subsidise private providers with State money. We in the Social Democrats firmly believe that while measures such as these should be taken to alleviate the immediate need and costs to parents, childcare should be a publicly provided State service in the same vein as education. We need a public childcare model in State ownership that offers families accessible and affordable childcare and that ensures the best possible care and early education for our children. It needs to be a model that gives staff security and dignity in their wages and it should be a system that is not subject to annual changes in funding levels and price increases. A public childcare alternative is the long-term solution. It is not even the long-term solution; we need to start introducing this now. We need to start setting a pathway to this now. I welcome the fact the Minister is now saying this is Green Party policy. I wish he had started even part of that five years ago rather than funding the private sector to deliver the service. We would now be five years more down the road with it. This is the solution we need to pursue as a State. It is the only solution that will ensure future generations do not have the same worries we had or have as parents.

The measures that have been taken have not made as much of a difference as they should have. Interestingly, there was research conducted. In the system we have at the moment, the smaller providers are struggling because they are not big enough. They are not the big corporates. They are finding it difficult to keep their heads above water in the current system. Then we have the large corporates, and they are making a huge amount of money off the backs of parents and the public, because public money subsidises the system. Research conducted by Michael Taaffe in 2023 went through the profits for these biggest corporate providers. Despite the pay increases for early years educators and despite the efforts the Government made to deal with that, the staff are still on €13.65 per hour. We can see it is not actually working.

The other thing we have not seen, which was reflected in the Minister's speech, is the choice families need being provided to them. There is no flexibility when it comes to childcare. There is not really the ability for parents to choose a childcare provider that suits their family and child. Each child, at different stages of their life, will need a different support and childcare model, and certainly that choice is not there for them. Unfortunately, this is because the subsidies that have been provided benefit the larger providers more. These providers look at pure profits. It is very hard to get a baby into a crèche because they are the most expensive to care for. The big providers are not looking after those different cohorts of children. This puts huge pressures on families.

I want to raise an issue about small providers I have seen in Wicklow, and it is about the bureaucratic nature of the system that is in place and the lack of transparency for them. One provider is in Wicklow town and the other is in Blessington. Both of them applied to the Department for the fee increase but they have not been told yet that they have received it. As a result, parents do not know if their fees are going to go up. The providers have told the parents they have applied for this increase. The providers do not know what is going to happen and, unfortunately, the Wicklow childcare committee does not seem to know either. One thing that could be done immediately is to get the channels of communication worked on so that providers know where they stand. If providers do not know where they stand, parents will not know where they stand, and that brings enormous stress.

If we continue to use sticking plasters in the form of public money to keep a private system as the model, we will continue to fail. The only way we will get this right is to have a fully public model of childcare that parents can avail of. Then the State can control the service and the money. The workers themselves would be happier because they would have job security as well. Unfortunately, this motion does not address that and I see it as a very large gap. We are coming up to an election and I hope that each of the parties will put a public model into their election manifestoes. It is time that parents in Ireland had the same service as parents all over Europe have. There is no reason they deserve less.

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