Paschal Mooney (Fianna Fail)

I welcome my friend and colleague, the Minister of State at the Department of Health and Children, Deputy Seán Power, to the House. I also welcome the opportunity for this House to add its voice to the evolving child care policy, which is a relatively recent phenomenon due to the growth in the economy over the past seven or eight years.

I must declare a small interest in this matter as I am chairman of the County Leitrim child care committee and have been involved in the child care area since it became an issue in the mid-1990s. At that time, as a member of Leitrim County Council, I was also on the County Leitrim partnership board which set up a child care committee to address the growing need for child care among women who increasingly sought to work outside the home.

When the Government set up the statutory committees I moved into the child care committee and have been chairman for several years. I come to this debate with a certain amount of baggage. I am pleased that more voices have been added to those early pioneering voices calling for a comprehensive policy on child care.

I acknowledge and compliment the Government on the initiatives it took under the equal opportunities programme. The Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform has come in for a certain amount of vilification primarily because when one talks about child care the last place one would think the policy reposes is the Department that deals with law and order. This is due to the equality dimension of the provision of funding, initially from the EU and subsequently from the Exchequer. After all, the word "equality" features in the Department's title.

Several decisions taken since then have added to the confusion in this area and there is a need for clarification and a more comprehensive approach to the provision of child care. I acknowledge too the outstanding work of my friend and colleague, Senator Mary White, in this area. It is important that someone focus on this, and who better than a person with a mix of expertise from politics and business who is more than capable of addressing the real needs? I wish her well in her initiatives.

The Minister for Finance, Deputy Cowen, was recently quoted in the national media — in remarks that he repeated at a party meeting — as saying that one of the immediate solutions to the increasing problem of providing child care services, since the Government had reached its target number of places, was to put more money into facilities. I was particularly struck that the statement came from the Minister for Finance. I was so impressed by it that I had to seek clarification in case he was being misquoted, but I am pleased to say that he endorsed everything that had been reported. He genuinely believes that the way forward is to provide more resources and increase places.

Perhaps I might give Senators some evidence, anecdotal rather than statistical, of the pressures faced by those currently providing child care facilities across the country. I add the caveat that there is a media perception that child care is about urban areas and big cities such as Dublin. However, that is not true. I live in Drumshanbo, County Leitrim, which has a catchment area of perhaps 1,500 people. In 2002, following capital grant aid from the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform, the then Minister, Deputy O'Donoghue, opened a new, state-of-the-art, all-day child care facility in the town. One part of the building provides child care facilities all day for babies through to pre-school age, as well as post-school facilities, so it probably covers the entire gamut. I believe it is now a condition of much of the Department's funding that one provides full-day care.

On the bottom level, there is an all-day special needs child care facility. Currently, 105 people access mainstream child care facilities, with a waiting list of 40 more, despite it being a small rural area. That gives some indication of the growth in demand for child care. Without labouring the point, I welcome the Minister's statements and look forward to the next budget, when I hope the Government will introduce a child care package.

I mentioned that the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform had evolved along the way. During that evolutionary period, two other Departments were involved on the periphery. One was the Department of Social and Family Affairs, which was removed from the equation some two or three years ago. The Department of Education and Science, which had an even more peripheral role, is now totally uninvolved. I understand that interdepartmental discussions are ongoing, particularly between the child care section of the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform and the Department of Education and Science, and I hope they bear fruit.

I will not go over ground already covered regarding securing more resources, an issue that will no doubt be raised again. I wish to focus on the child's early development. I am somewhat concerned that Government policy has been directed almost exclusively towards using women — I say "using" in the widest possible sense — to contribute to economic growth. In other words, one gets women out of the home and into the workforce, providing child care all day if possible, and even after school. Effectively, the State provides a child-minding service so that we can get women working. That means that we will fill all those places and be rich and prosperous, living happily ever after.

I hope that, within that policy framework, which I broadly support, the necessity of examining the needs of children themselves is recognised. In many child care facilities, there is an inadequate focus on the development of the child's intellectual and other skills. For most of those involved in training at FETAC II and FETAC III level, it is a matter of child-minding rather than wider development. Some kind of publicly stated programme should be introduced by the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform and the Department of Education and Science whereby all child care facilities, whether State or private, should provide a specific model to assist the development of the child's skills, particularly for those in pre-school, since it is they who attend in the morning and early afternoon. I would like to hear of developments in that area.

My final point relates once again to a rural issue. The child care committees of County Leitrim and County Sligo completed research in conjunction with County Leitrim Partnership identifying lack of transport for after-school services as a major barrier to women returning to the labour force. There are currently 21 after-school services in County Leitrim. Six of those have small-scale transport projects supported through own funds, fees and minor grants. Should funding be made available for those to continue, with the remainder provided to develop transport projects, the number of parents, particularly women, able to return to work or training would increase greatly, as they would be provided with a continuous child care service extending from school, starting at 9 a.m., to after-school projects, closing at 6.30 p.m. That request was transmitted to Irish Rural Link, which agreed to support the county child care committees in the north west in putting the issue of lack of transport for after-school services on the national agenda.

It is sometimes forgotten from a big-city perspective that there are large areas of the country where public transport is poor, inadequate or, in some instances, non-existent. If one is a woman who would like to get out of the home for an hour or two each day and has no child-minding facility or alternative means of having one's children looked after, and the nearest job opportunity is ten or 20 miles away — a reality for many — it is incumbent on the Government to examine rural transport as an integrated part of overall national child care policy.