Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Exactly, there must be one to watch the sleeping room. Thus the economics of the baby room are not good in themselves, but at the same time, in tandem with that, we have seen increased parental leave and other supports. We have paternity leave and other elements that have come in that are positive and important.I would rather that we advocated for women or parents to have longer time and that first year with their child, rather than necessarily greater funding for baby places. However, I appreciate that there is a need.

There is an issue in the standardisation of the inspection criteria. There are matters that are trivial that get recorded on inspection reports as non-compliance matters when actually they are something small that is dealt with on the day of the inspection before the inspector has even left the premises. That is very unfair for that to go into a public document as non-compliance. There are other things that can be the whim of an inspector. I have experience working in support and I have been a mentor with the Dublin City Childcare Committee for a long time. I have gone in and been a troubleshooter with services to try to support them. One of the things I found along the way in one instance, for example, was a door arrangement that was perfect for ten years that suddenly got on the nerves of the same inspector that had walked past it on previous occasions in previous years. Suddenly it became an issue. We should not have that because that leaves a sense of uncertainty as to whether one is fully in compliance or not. Most services are very good in organising that.

The administrative burden on services is absolutely enormous. We either need to refine it, which I think we are on a trajectory to do, or we need to supply more funding for administrative positions and acknowledge there are many other things, such as HR matters, that also need to be dealt with. Rather than always funding the childcare professionals, and that is rightly so, we also need to fund other positions within the services.

I completely agree with the Senator. This was one of my lines for today. Here is the breaking news. If you live in a one-bedroom apartment, you could well actually have sex and could well have a baby. I know it is major news. However, for some reason, in our criteria for exemption, one-bedroom apartments do not count when we are counting the numbers for where 75 units are being built. One-bedroom apartments are not counted as housing children and, in some instances, two-bedroom apartments are not counted. This is for those purposes of when there is a necessity to put in a childcare service. I have been long advocating with the Minister of State, and I know the Minister, Deputy O’Gorman, has as well, to remove that exemption because it is absolutely nonsense. Here we have a way for fast and easy provision of infrastructure that could be delivered if there is an obligation on the developers to do that.

I thank the Senator for the motion. It is important that we raise the issues, but we need to applaud - and I appreciate the Senator did – the fact a huge amount is being done. To use a phrase from the Minister of State’s party, a lot more needs to be done, but we are going the right direction and we need to celebrate that.