Cecilia Keaveney (Fianna Fail)

I listened carefully to the Minister of State's contributions on the scheme in this House, the Dáil, at a Fianna Fáil parliamentary party meeting and at other meetings. I am under the impression the scheme will be fluid and the reason he is seeking information is he wants to amend it. I am glad he is present for the debate because it is a live issue in Donegal. A number of people there would like the scheme to be forgotten about altogether and the old staffing grant retained while others do not consider the staffing grant to be an appropriate solution but they also have a problem with the new scheme. While there are misunderstandings about the scheme, it also contains a number of discrepancies. It would be much better to deal with them as soon as the Minister of State obtains the relevant information rather than delaying that process, and this is his intention.

I congratulate the Government on the serious capital investment in child care in the recent past. While it may have been well overdue, in the case of Donegal, 64% of such facilities have been developed on a community basis. The involvement of communities has been maximised on the basis that their need drove them to draw the moneys down and they were central to the development of the service from the bottom up. When Deputy John O'Donoghue served as Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, he met a number of community activists in Buncrana. He implored them to make an application to draw down money under the then scheme to Pat Murray, the relevant official at the time. He also moved on to greener pastures. While applications were slow in arriving initially, its success is visible nowadays in many locations.

Expertise has been developed in Donegal because many of those who lost jobs in the textile industry were encouraged to consider child care as a new employment source. Generations of young girls pursued the qualification and they are well qualified in child care. They feel most under threat currently and I would like to know whether they are right. The goal of the new scheme is to assist those in greatest need achieve affordable child care. It also goes beyond those on welfare payments and assists those on family income supports.

A public meeting on child care in Letterkenny last Monday night was well attended and a number of people stated all child care should be free and if that was not possible, the cost should be the same for everybody. I believe in the concept of free preschool education and I am a firm advocate of investment in the zero to six years age group. If wisely spent, this would be the greatest investment made by the Government because it would ensure the neurological development and socialisation of our children through music, co-ordination and rhythmic development and speech development. By a child's seventh birthday, it would be too late to invest these funds if the Government wished to attain the same results. This would be the wisest investment ever made by officials in the Department of Finance because lower investment would be required as a consequence tackling issues such as juvenile delinquency and learning disability. Solutions to many attention deficit disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder related issues that evolve later in life could be provided earlier.

I have a problem with how seriously we are taking preschool education and prenatal care.