Aideen Hayden (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for coming to the House today. I agree with much of what Senators van Turnhout and Henry have said and will not repeat it. The Minister's record speaks for itself in terms of her excellent performance.

I will be very brief in what I have to say about the "Prime Time" programme, because I wish to move beyond that programme. There is an issue with how the matter came into the public domain; it has been reported that the HSE had inspected one of the crèches one month earlier. There is an issue with the inspection regime. I am aware of similar inspection regimes in other areas where the form of the inspection is the issue. Some inspections end up being nothing more than a box-ticking exercise, and in reality, people do what is inspected and not what is expected. As the Minister said, enforcement is the key. I welcome the commitments the Minister has made and the matters she outlined in her statement. While I will not spend much time going into them, enforcement and inspection are key.

I wish to broaden the debate slightly. There are two issues: one is childminding, which must incorporate child safety, and the other is early years education strategy. Of course the two issues are not mutually exclusive, but I believe we have developed a two-tier child-care system - the formal system, which is being delivered principally through private crèches, and the informal sector, mainly involving children being minded by other members of their communities in low-formality settings, generally outside the tax system.

I raise the issue, which has become more prominent recently, of significant numbers of children being minded by au pairs. Senator van Turnhout mentioned this on a previous occasion and we need to get to grips with it. There is far too little regulation of au pairs, many of whom are being left in charge of very young and vulnerable children.

Regarding the informal system of child care, I draw the Minister's attention to a matter I raised with the Minister for Justice and Equality, Deputy Shatter, during the debate on the National Vetting Bureau (Children and Vulnerable Persons) Bill 2012. That legislation is deficient in not making provision for the vetting of people providing informal child care. The response from the Department was that it was not possible because of how the Bill was structured. However, it must be possible to allow for an individual to put himself or herself forward to be vetted so that at the very least parents putting a child into an informal child-care setting are aware that the person to whom they are entrusting their child has been appropriately vetted. I believe it must be possible to put such a system in place.

Regarding State support for child care in financial terms, we depend far too much on private provision. We must tackle the issue of bringing informal child care within a regulatory system, which we do not have at the moment.