Micheál Carrigy (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State. I would say to Senator Martin that it will probably be 11 p.m. or 11.30 p.m. when I get home tonight, but I will see the kids in the morning, which is why I continue to drive up and down every day. When one has a young family, it can be difficult to be away. My wife is a primary school teacher who works too, so we know the benefit of childcare from the last years. The reality is that childcare has been neglected. People in that sector have been underpaid. That has started to be addressed for next year and that will continue. It is a priority of Government to make sure that we invest in childcare and increase the wages of those who are working in it. Next week, the Minister of State, Deputy Peter Burke, will introduce legislation relating to paternity benefit for those of us in elected life. I think that is long past time.

I was involved in setting up an afterschool service in my community. We identified a need in our area which was not there previously. Parents came to me with issues. We applied to Pobal for funding to set it up in our community centre, which is located next door to our school. This proved successful. It has been running for the last eight years. We have over 70 families. We have increased the numbers in our schools because we are providing the service and others are not. We start at 8 a.m. and go to 9.30 a.m., or when school starts, then from 2 p.m. until 6 p.m. It has been extremely beneficial to working parents. We need that because our economy is at full employment and significant parts of our economy are looking for people. It is important to have that infrastructure in place but it is not in place in other areas. Many publicly-owned buildings sit with empty classrooms in various locations around the country. I feel they should be used as afterschool facilities for parents. We do not need to build anything new. They are already there to be utilised for the benefit of parents, in particular. That needs to be taken on board by the Departments of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth and Education.

I believe that supports are needed for the voluntary committees that run many of these community childcare facilities. As I say, I know first-hand the headaches and sometimes the resistance to it. I know how much working time is put in by a voluntary committee to make sure that it works and that wages are paid. It basically involves running a private company which has to be kept afloat to make sure that staff are available to look after children. I would like to see some extra supports for the voluntary committee, which does a lot of hard work behind the scenes. I have spoken to the Minister of State about ECCE staff. As she will be aware, the Joint Committee on Autism launched a report only last week with regard to the lack of summer provision in schools throughout the country, especially in special schools. We have a scheme for which more than 80,000 children with needs throughout the country are eligible. They need stability during the summer months and will regress if they do not get the minimum of four weeks intervention during that period. As the Minister of State is aware, a significant number of schools do not do offer summer provision. They point to a lack of staff and, yet, we have qualified ECCE staff with various levels of education who are more than capable of working within a school-based programme to make sure that summer provision could be offered. We have a situation where a number of ECCE staff are signing on to the register for the summer months. That is not acceptable. It does not make sense and needs to change.

One our recommendations in the report was to employ staff working in the ECCE system in our schools for the summer months to provide a summer programme for the most vulnerable kids. The programme is badly needed in our special schools in particular where 86% of the children, more than 8,000, did not get a place on the summer school programme. That is a fact. Of the total number of children, 3.8% got the four weeks. Children with severe and high needs are not getting the supports they need. They regress over the summer. When they come back in September, their teachers have to work for two or three months to get them back to where they were before the summer break. I ask that this be taken into account. I met representatives from a national organisation at a recent event in Leinster House. ECCE workers are more than qualified to work in that system. I ask that it be opened up and that we allow the full complement of those working in the ECCE system to work in school-based programmes next summer.