Kathleen O'Meara (Labour)

Like other speakers, I welcome the Minister of State to the House. I also welcome the statements on this important issue.

This is not the first time we have touched on this subject. The recent report published by the National Economic and Social Forum has allowed us to focus on one part of a broad area of social policy, namely caring for children, for which the term "child care" has become shorthand, with which we are only now coming to terms. It is extraordinary that we are only now waking up to the neglect of this extremely important area of social policy. When I was a journalist in the 1980s and the parent of young children, I tried to interest newspapers in carrying an article on child care and occasionally I was successful. The issues at that time concerned finding a child care place and the regulation and quality of child care facilities and they continued to be the issues for some time. Until relatively recently child care was, to a large extent, a minority issue because there was not the same level, as there is currently, of participation by mothers in the workforce. The increased level of their participation in the workforce has caught up with us very quickly.

A recently published report by the National Women's Council of Ireland, which I commend for its major contribution to this debate, pointed out that traditionally, the care of children was exclusively the concern of parents and,as policymakers, successive Governments have left it to parents to make their own private arrangements for the care of their children while they go out to work. However, we can no longer do that because of the number of parents working and the fact that this is having an economic impact. It is a regrettable that it is the economic impact caused by the lack of a child care infrastructure that has put this issue on the agenda rather than the issue in its own right.

This debate is good because we have narrowed the issue to focus on early childhood education which has been largely neglected. We have an excellent primary education system but until the establishment of the early childhood development unit in Drumcondra we did not examine the importance of and the measures to be introduced to provide for the education and care of very young children. However, we are dealing with this issue now and we have a unique opportunity to put in place the best possible infrastructure and delivery in terms of child care. I do not see why we cannot aspire to achieving that, given the backdrop of the level of prosperity and economic activity against which we are working.

The Government has a certain level of income, which I hope future Governments will have, but that will be only possible if the child care infrastructure issue is dealt with. Assuming it is dealt with, this and future Governments will have available to them the resources to put in place the best possible child care infrastructure in the world. That should be the foundation for our economy going forward.

We also have an extraordinary opportunity to eliminate childhood poverty and, in many ways, we have a moral responsibility to do so. We have the resources and ability to tackle and eliminate childhood poverty. We have only to look across the water at what the British Government has done to deal with this issue in recent years and compare that to the limited progress made in the United States due to the fairly minimal investment made there. Targeted investment in child care in disadvantaged areas can be effective in tackling poverty at source. We have a moral responsibility to do that. We can do it now and we should. I hope that an initiative to this effect will be put forward by the Government shortly.

The recently published NESF report is a major contribution to this debate. I commend all those who worked on it and produced a valuable addition to the debate on this issue. The press release issued by NESF at midnight on Sunday, 25 September posed the question, what progress has been made on implementing early childhood education policy, to which the answer is very little. The press releases states:

The child care sector is weakly regulated and conceived mainly as a service for working mothers. The NESF report concludes that there has been little progress in relation to the implementation of the policy decisions set out in the Government White Paper on ... [early childhood care and education] in 1999, instead we have had "a picture of inaction, peripheral implementation and drift".

That is a quote from the NESF report and not my version of events. It is the level we are at. There has been inaction, peripheral implementation and drift. Small bits have been done in an ad hoc fashion without any overall thrust in terms of delivery. Other Senators pointed to the absence of a single Department or Ministry with responsibility for implementing child care policy. I believe that is a missed opportunity. However, it is possible to put in place an agency that would be answerable to one Minister and clearly, the Minister for Education and Science has a major role in this area. A single ministry or a well resourced, high-powered agency is required to deliver the necessary infrastructure which we have only started to deliver.

The county child care committees, which took many years to put in place, are working well and are delivering the equal opportunities childcare programme. It is an ad hoc programme devised within the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform. I am delighted it was devised there because if it was not I do not know where we would be. I wish to mention a public servant, Ms Sylda Langford and pay tribute to the work she has done virtually single-handedly because of her passion for this area. Without her drive and energy this would not be happening. Much has been said about the public service but in terms of an individual who has made a major contribution, she should be singled out in this area.

It is an anomaly that child care is being delivered from the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform. It is being delivered from a single unit and, as pointed out, €500 million has been spent. An examination of the operation of the equal opportunities child care programme reveals the results of good capital investment throughout the country in terms of the delivery of child care centres. However, there is a significant problem regarding the continuity of service because there is a reliance on people participating in community employment schemes to staff these centres. I am on the board of the Nenagh Childcare Centre which is located in an excellent state of the art building on a site donated by the county council and it is fabulously well managed. Of the 22 full-time staff, 17 are community employment workers. I do not have a problem with that as they are all well trained and they are doing an excellent job. Nevertheless, that illustrates the fine balance on which such centres are operating. We need far more investment at that level, particularly in terms of what those publicly funded centres can deliver to target disadvantage and support families who are disadvantaged, not in ghettoised context but in a broader community context. Excellent work is being done in regard.

I point out to the Minister of State what I have said before here, namely, that the equal opportunities child care programme is barely a start. The county child care committees are also barely a start. While the investment made appears significant, it is only scratching the surface of the investment required to provide what needs to be done. This issue needs to be viewed in the wider context of a range of measures, including maternity leave, parental leave, paternity leave, flexible working and family friendly work policies.

I ask the Government to look at what is happening in Britain. I do not propose that we should do what they are doing. However, we should look at what is working and what is not. In particular, we should look at the Sure Start programme from which the results have been spectacular within a very short timeframe. There is a core issue for us to look at from the viewpoint of social policy and the opportunities we have. One thinks of the introduction of free education and the difference it has made to this country over an entire generation. Perhaps quite a number of the Members in this Chamber would not have got the education they did if this had not been available to them. We should also consider the high priority given to education in Ireland and what this has delivered.

However, a key part of the puzzle is missing, namely, the smallest citizen and the earliest opportunity to invest in education. This is in interesting contrast to Britain and presents some key dilemmas for us. My recollection is that the CSO figures show that 50% of children under five are cared for by their parents at home. The remaining 50% are cared for in a variety of settings — crèches, relations, friends, the usual. We are still considering what the best possible arrangements should be, particularly for very small children. I hope we can have a reasoned debate on that whole issue.

The National Women's Council proposes that those who choose not to stay at home for the first year of an infant's life should have access to a well regulated and supported child care option. There is an issue to be addressed as regards the so-called stay at home parent. This needs to be looked at in terms of supports. It is not simply an economic issue. It is an issue of social policy that has to do with the care of children. It clearly has to do with parents being in the workforce, but that is not the only dynamic at work here. We are at a point when progress may be made on this issue and something extraordinary can be created, not only for children, but for the whole community.