Joan Collins (Dublin South Central, Independents 4 Change) | Oireachtas source

I am sharing time with my three colleagues. I am supporting the Private Members' motion from Sinn Féin on this childcare payment, as I would support any Private Members' motion calling for more money to be put into people's pockets. Childcare is one of the biggest costs to working families and it is a growing cost that is pricing parents, particularly women, out of employment. It is like a second mortgage or rent for people. Like mortgages and rent, under this Government it keeps going up. This is against a backdrop of rising in-work poverty rates, rising child deprivation rates, rising single parent at risk of poverty rates, and rising child homelessness. Families cannot afford to keep going on like this and childcare is one of the big areas where we can really take the pressure off struggling families. The Minister announced two days ago that there would be an increase in childcare funding in this budget. I welcome that. The problem is that this is just another programme where the Government attempts to provide public services with public money through private providers and it is just not working. We are seeing the same things play out across all these programmes, in childcare, nursing homes and homeless accommodation. We have funding streams that usually are not enough to ensure that these private providers can stay in business without price hikes or cutbacks. They then struggle to provide an adequate quality of service or decent pay and conditions for their workers. The increases in Government funding for childcare we saw last year have largely been eaten up by price increases. In many cases, price increases are the exact same amount as the funding increases. Parents and families have seen none of the benefits, and all for the purpose of the Government's aversion to publicly providing services we all need.

We need a universal public childcare system, directly funded and run by the State. It is the only way to guarantee that funding and costs match. We would create a good system for families, children and childcare workers and it would allow us to have a free-at-point-of-access childcare system that does not put more and more pressure on families. Belgium, Denmark, Lithuania, Norway and Slovenia provide free childcare for under threes. These are comparable countries except that, unlike us, they do not have the luxury of multi-billion euro budget surpluses. There is no reason we cannot provide free childcare through a fully funded public system that provides a decent place to work for staff and offers children and families a safe, free and high-quality service.

I listened to the briefing from the Federation of Early Childhood Providers today, which covers more than 40% of early years services nationwide. I believe its precarious situation should be listened to and its proposals accepted by the Minister when they meet next week, pending the implementation of a publicly-funded childcare system where they can be incorporated over a period of time through pilot schemes or whatever. That is what is needed. They need to be kept in place until that happens.

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