Brendan Smith (Cavan-Monaghan, Fianna Fail)

I am glad we have created almost 40,000 new child care places under the EOCP and we have the target of creating a further 50,000 places under the national child care investment programme. We will ensure that we will deliver those figures. I also re-emphasise that from the outset when we announced the scheme in July, we stated that there would be a 12 months' transition period that the new scheme would not take effect in reality until July 2008. We stated clearly that we wanted the data back from every community child care sector in order that the officials in the Department could analyse it.