Ivana Bacik (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister, Deputy Zappone, to the House. It is a pleasure to have her here in her new role, on which I congratulate her. I would like to say how good it was to work with her in the Seanad in the previous term. I congratulate her also on the single affordable child care scheme, which received a very positive response generally. Other colleagues raised various issues and asked questions about it, and I hope to speak about and focus on it too.

However, before I do so, I wish to raise with the Minister two issues that also relate to her brief, given that is the focus of this debate. The first is the urgency of commencing the Children First legislation. This was raised by the organisation One in Four last week. The Act introduces mandatory reporting for a range of professionals. We did a good deal of work on it in the justice committee, as the Minister will recall, so we should not lose sight of it. Sometimes legislation, as the Minister will be aware, particularly in the area of children, has been passed but then it languishes on the Statute Book for many years before it is commenced, so it is something we need to watch.

Second, I raise with her the recommendations of the UN rapporteurs to Ireland on the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child earlier this year, which were discussed at the First Child Summit. Some of the issues they raised were also raised in the book published by the ESRI, which the Minister launched in recent weeks, based on the Growing Up in Ireland study, which contained some disturbing findings on the expectations of children in contemporary Ireland. We find children's well-being in contemporary Ireland still being largely shaped by parental circumstance and social and economic position. I know the Minister is well aware of the data on that, but it has also been raised at international level in the context of the number of children living in consistent poverty and the growing number of homeless children. In that context, I also raise with her the condition of children living in direct provision settings and ask her to bring her influence to bear on the Government in the implementation at least of the Mahon report recommendations on improving conditions for families and children, in particular, in direct provision. Those recommendations were put forward during the term of the last Government, but it is disappointing that they have not been given more focus in the lifetime of the current Government.

I refer to the UN rapporteurs' focus on the issue of divestment. They raised the following question, which has been raised in other forums and at international and national level. How does the religious patronage of schooling, currently more than 90% of our primary schools, impact on children, specifically children of non-Christian families and children who were maybe brought up in families with no designated religion? There has been a very disappointing lack of progress on the policy of divestment originally announced by the former Minister, Ruairí Quinn, but which we have seen languish. I speak as somebody who was very involved in the starting up a multidenominational school, under Educate Together patronage, which had formerly been a Catholic school. We were very involved in one of the first divestments in my area of the south inner city Dublin, but it has been very disappointing that so few further divestments have taken place. Again, I know this is not directly in the Minister's area - it clearly comes under the Department of Education and Skills - but it has been raised in the context of children's rights at international level. Again, I ask her to bring her influence to bear within Cabinet on that.

Child care is an issue in which many of us are very personally invested. Senator Richmond referred to it. As a parent of young children, who has paid for child care and has sought it for children for some years, I know personally the very direct personal impact that the Minister's scheme will have, and I very much welcome it. As I said, it has been broadly welcomed. We are relatively unique in Ireland in that we have extremely high child care costs for parents and very low levels of State investment traditionally. Others have spoken about this. Clearly, one must consider women's role in society in Ireland generally to understand why so little focus has been paid politically to child care over the years. I, therefore, very much welcome the renewed focus in this regard, but we must see it in a gendered context. The Minister will be very well aware of this and of the language in Article 41 of our Constitution which recognises mothers as having duties in the home exclusively - there is no reference to fathers - and women as having a life within the home. We need to move beyond that. I hope we will see the removal of that language from the Constitution and its replacement, as the Constitutional Convention recommended, with gender-neutral language respecting the role of carers.

As the Minister said, it is also important we ensure the measures she has announced are not seen in some way to discriminate against parents who do not work outside the home. There has been an unfortunate tendency to pit mothers against one another, when in fact we should all seek the same thing. Of course, increasing the quality and value of early child care and education and allowing parents to spend significant amounts of time at home are not mutually exclusive, and we can achieve a model where both are valued and parents' choices and children's rights are emphasised and given priority. Generally, we tend to look to the Scandinavian model of family-friendly work policies, such as parental and paternity leave, alongside publicly subsidised early years facilities for all. We see an emphasis in this model on parental choice and children's rights. Parents are enabled to remain at home for at least the first year of a child's life and policies are adopted on a gender-neutral basis. This applies in countries that have a much larger tax base than, and a very different tax system from, ours, and we need to be cognisant of that.In the Labour Party we recently heard from Ciairín de Buis, the former director of Start Strong, who has advocated that we look to other countries too, not just Scandinavia but also New Zealand, for example. There is a tax base similar to ours in New Zealand which is not as developed as that in Scandinavia. It set out a reforming early years strategy some time ago, placing a particular emphasis on high levels of qualifications of the workforce in early childhood education. I wish to specifically refer to this. In the Labour Party's child care policy during the last general election entitled, "Standing up for Families", we emphasised the need to invest in high-quality child care, not just to reduce the cost to parents. We called for the placing of a cap on child care costs for parents to reduce them to no more than €2 per hour by 2021. Coupled with this, we also called for an increase in the quality of child care settings by ensuring the greater professionalisation of those working in early childhood education. I know that the Minister has asked specifically for Senators' view on the investment of resources. That is one area in which we could really do with an investment of resources. We know that staff in the child care sector generally tend to be low paid and, until relatively recently, low levels of qualifications were required. We called in our policy for a transforming of quality by ensuring a higher premium for providers with highly qualified staff. I know that this is being started. It was started under the previous Government and we also started to enhance inspection rates of pre-school facilities. Again, we could do a lot more in that regard.

I argue for a distinction to be made between child care and early childhood education. We need to ensure we talk about early childhood education specifically. It is extremely formative and important for the development of children. It must be separate from, although closely related to, child care. All in all, we need to ensure we are reconceptualising early childhood care and education in terms of children's rights in line with the constitutional amendment brought forward by the previous Government.