Mary White (Fianna Fail)

Along with my colleagues, I would like to present bouquets to the Minister of State, Deputy de Valera. I thank her for her personal courtesy to me since I came to the Seanad and the empathy she showed me as a rookie in the House. I will miss her on a personal level.

I congratulate the Minister of State on achieving an extra €900,000 in the recent Estimates for child care. Reference was made to that in her speech. As Senator Tuffy outlined, until now, child care support has been restricted to full-time further education programmes. The sum of €500,000 of this additional funding will be used to extend child care support to participants under the back to education initiative which is part-time from 2007. In recommendation No. 5 of my document, A New Approach to Childcare, which I launched two weeks ago——