Claire Kerrane (Roscommon-Galway, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I was disappointed to see a good chunk of the Minister's amendment criticising the plan I launched last week. He does not have to like the plan, of course. I am not interested in that kind of politicking. I do not do it. I do not believe that the parents are interested in it either. The Minister sees our plan as having no vision. Our plan has a vision and is the actual way to get to €10 per day. If we strip everything out of it, the fact is that we are spending €1.2 billion of taxpayers' money, and those taxpayers are still paying up to €1,500 per month for childcare. Something is very wrong when that is the situation. For approximately €106 million, we can take in everyone in a childcare setting and everyone with a Tusla-registered childminder now and give the parents €10 per day for childcare. That can allow them to go to work. It can improve child development and can prepare them for school. It is transformative for parents and children and for the childcare sector. That can be done. It would be the best €106 million we could spend.

With regard to the early years educators, again, the Minister in his amended motion stated that pay has increased. The most recent pay increase was 65 cent. That is a slap in the face to these professionals. That is why they are leaving the sector. If we do not move quickly with regard to pay and ring-fence it and do it ourselves rather than leaving it solely up to the joint labour committee, JLC, more and more people are going to leave the sector and that is going to leave us with less and less capacity. In fairness, the Minister had a prime opportunity in the last four years to look at doing what the Partnership for the Public Good did. In its terms of reference, it could not look at a public model of funding. The Minister could have done that in the last four years given that he said his party is committed to it. That work could have been done to look at the public model about which much has been said tonight. I do not believe that politicians should design the public model. I am absolutely committed to it. I am actually uncomfortable with profit being made in this sector, but we cannot get to the public model overnight. It has never been looked at in an Irish context. Parents and particularly educators in the sector cannot wait. They need better pay. Parents need reduced costs. That has to be done, and the best way to do that is to look at the model we are suggesting.

In the last few seconds, I want to mention the issue of flexibility for parents' leave and benefit. The Minister stated in the amended motion that we are at 46 weeks. However, lone parents or one-parent families are at 35 weeks. What we are putting forward is the additional nine weeks their baby does not get if a child is born into a one-parent family. I have raised this with Heather Humphreys and I hope the Minister will do likewise. They get the 26 weeks in the case of a mother and another nine weeks, and in a two-parent family, they get the 26 weeks and another 18 weeks. We are bringing forward a proposal to end that discrimination and provide the extra nine weeks, which should be there and should always have been there for that baby, and propose an additional eight weeks to get them to 52 weeks. It is nowhere near 46 weeks for one-parent families. That is wrong and it should be fixed.

Lastly, what is there today is not affordable, it is not accessible and the flexibility for parents is not there. We have a major issue with regard to waiting lists. There are 33,000 children on waiting lists for childcare places. Our proposals are quick ways in which we can build capacity. It has to be the commitment to the early years educators in the sector if we are to keep them, otherwise they are going to keep leaving. We have to give them the commitment that we will continue to increase their pay and then in some way they might decide to remain on and not go and study something else. We have to give them that certainty. Then, looking at the social enterprise model, I can think of five community centres in my area that are either vacant all of the time or underused during the day. Let us use those buildings. We do not need to go through 18 months of planning permission. Let us do it in a community, not-for-profit way, which brings us to that public model as well. We have to be innovative in building capacity and we have to build it quickly. With regard to childminders, we must of course bring them in in a fair way and in a way that suits them and does not add too much red tape to what we are already doing. That, too, will build capacity, but we need to build it and we need to build it quickly, and that is what our motion is about.

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