Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

I will start with a quote from a parent who put it extremely well:

Early years childcare in Ireland seems broken. The staff themselves are poorly paid and move frequently. Parents have to pay exorbitant fees, which become even more challenging to fund if there is more than one child. The Government needs to look at a more wholescale change to the system. There are environmental and social impacts to families being forced to travel long distances to find crèche places. There are also gender-based inequalities, as women are often forced to reduce hours or take leave from work in order to make childcare affordable. This has a significant impact on long-term earning potential.

They summed it up: The current model of childcare is utterly broken and is failing almost everybody involved. It is failing the workers who are poorly paid with very high rates of turnover. It is failing the families who pray they will find a place for their child. Sometimes they cannot find a place until they are two or older and are then faced with paying the equivalent of another mortgage or even two. At the moment it is failing them because of the privatised model. I know that multiple crèches in my constituency, and I presume it is a significant number across the country, are telling parents that they will opt out of the core funding and will hike fees by 35%, 40% or 50% - by an extraordinary amount – and they have the parents over a barrel. They are effectively able to hold their children to ransom and parents have no choice. It is failing many of the small operators who are really struggling with all the things they have to do to access core funding, the pressure from the bigger operators and so on. The only ones it is working for are the big chains which are making enormous profits. Figures came out about that recently.

Unfortunately what we have before us, in what the Government is doing and plans to do and in terms of Sinn Féin’s motion, is an attempt to build on this completely failed model. We support the Sinn Féin motion. Obviously we welcome people’s childcare costs coming down but it just involves throwing more money at this privatised model and not getting to the root of the problem. It is very well for the Minister to try to criticise the Sinn Féin motion from the left and say we need to have public childcare but the Minister is responsible for the current model. There is no indication of a public childcare model. The whole system is built around public money for a privatised model.

That is the fundamental problem. That is what needs to be addressed. The best way to deal with this is to establish a publicly owned and operated national childcare service. We launched our policy on this last year. It outlines it very clearly. It should be operated completely free of charge, just like primary school and secondary education are operated. There is no reason preschool should be different. It should be available to all children equally regardless of where they live, whether they have additional needs or how rich or poor their parents are. That is how we cherish all the children of the nation equally. This is why we support the launch tomorrow of the alliance for a public system of early childhood education and care. It is crucial that childcare is provided as a publicly owned and operated service and not outsourced to private providers as it has been until now. It is about respecting childcare workers as the essential public servants they are with wages and conditions on a par with teachers and ensuring that therefore every child gets quality childcare.

The century of appalling abuse perpetrated in primary and secondary schools by the Catholic Church shows the danger of the State outsourcing its responsibility for educating our children. It is not that long since the State started outsourcing early childhood care and education to the private sector but already we have a lengthening litany of abuse. Earlier this year, the High Court approved awards of €615,000 to 40 very young children who were mistreated by the Hyde and Seek crèche chain. The crèches were understaffed leading to neglect. Children were left in dirty nappies and left to go hungry, apparently so that the owners could cut costs and make higher profits. Three quarters of childcare services in this country are run for profit at the moment. Earlier this week, we heard reports of physical and verbal abuse of two and three year olds at a charity-run crèche in south Dublin. Children’s heads were slapped, their legs hit, a child with sensory issues was force fed until they vomited and tiny little kids were called abusive names. It would really make your heart break.

Of course, it should go without saying that the vast majority of childcare services are not abusive. Every day tens of thousands of parents trust them to mind their children and to make sure that they are well looked after. People can see for themselves the care that the childcare workers have for their children but far too often, going above and beyond is what childcare workers are forced to do because of inadequate resources and inadequate Government support. A survey carried out by SIPTU earlier this year found that 68% of workers felt pressure due to staff shortages. That was a big issue. Some 65% cited stress and burnout and staff turnover is running at 25%. The major reason for all this is very low pay for childcare workers. Pay is as low as €13.65 an hour so it is not surprising that 86% identified low pay as the biggest work issue and 95% said they were only able to make ends meet with difficulty or great difficulty. Why are the wages so low? According to a report by TASC in 2020, the single most important factor in lowering the pay and conditions of care work is the extent to which it is marketised. In other words, the reason the pay is so low is so that crèche workers can make higher profits. The lower the wages, the higher the profits.

There does seem to be a rip-off of parents. We have received numerous complaints in my constituency about sudden and very large increases. One crèche, Rathfarnham Daycare informed parents that it is leaving the core funding scheme and increasing its fees by between €300 and €350 per month per child. It said it did not have the money and that is why it needed to do so. When parents looked at its accounts, they found that €1.6 million had been paid to directors in 2022 and that over €200,000 had been declared in profit in 2023. Yet the Minister answers to say that they are still in the core funding scheme. It is another example of why we need a proper public national childcare service.

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