Shane Cassells (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Yesterday, we saw a disgraceful act by the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth. The Department withdrew from a 20-year salary scale agreement with county childcare committees across the country - not because it wanted to give childcare autonomy but because it decided it was not going to meet the terms of a Workplace Relations Commission from September that had ruled on an increase regarding pay grades for the staff.It asked how it would extract itself from this and said that it would say it was not people's employers. It told staff to pay themselves what they wanted but that it would not give them the money to make sure that they were actually paid. It put that in the circular and hammered that home. That agreement would have cost a measly €360,000. When the country was in lockdown and we needed to get front-line staff to their stations, and they needed childcare to allow them to do that, these people orchestrated that. When it comes to honouring an agreement reached in the WRC, the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth has weaselled its way out of it by walking away from a 20-year-old agreed practice. Why do that? Does it not want these people as public servants even though these are the people who implement Government policy in childcare across the country? It is a sector that is run by voluntary boards and gets plenty of plaudits, but has seen damn all increases to budgets that operate this system over successive Governments, for 20 years. The entire system is operated for the pittance of €11 million.

How can the Department get away with this stroke? Does it think that it can? Is it because 236 of the 240 employees across the country are women? Is that why it thinks it can do this? Would it attempt this if they were men? The Minister need not bother coming in again with flowery language, saying he values the work of the childcare structure in this country after that act of deplorable stroke politics yesterday. He cannot stand over that and he clearly does not value the work of these people after what happened yesterday. It was a full stroke and a slap in the face to the efforts to a determined group of professional women, since it is mainly women, to professionalise the system of childcare in this country. They were given the two fingers by the Department yesterday and it was a disgrace.