Erin McGreehan (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister to the House. I thank Senator Currie and the Fine Gael Senators for tabling the motion. It is very important that we all speak in here on childcare. The Government is the first Government to have a real focus on childcare and it is very welcome. It has provided one of the largest budgets ever. We have seen a lot of positive changes over the past four years. The Minister has stuck to his word. I remember speaking to him in the first year of the Government and over the years. We are right to be ambitious. We have come a long way and we are very right to be ambitious for our childcare sector, the people who work in it and the children who use it. I support many of the points Senator Currie made on advanced planning and looking at where we have neglected to put in childcare facilities after we had planned for them. We have to work around it.

To swing away from the motion on the childcare sector I will reiterate, as I have on many occasions and I know the Minister supports it, the professionalisation of the sector. We must ensure we have career progression in the sector and that the people working there are valued as educators. They are highly educated people. As we know, they are highly-qualified and their income does not match what they have done at university. As a pitch for budget 2025 I ask that we earmark more money for salaries for people working in the sector.

I support pathways for public childcare spaces. We have an opportunity for this. We see where places have not been developed into the planned childcare facilities. How can the State create a mechanism, as Senator Currie has asked, whereby the State owns a building, takes a lease on it and tenders it out or empowers county childcare committees to facilitate it? I know this is ambitious but we have to be ambitious for our children and the people working in the sector.

The sector is under pressure. Smaller providers lose staff to bigger providers because of an inability to pay larger incomes. They are at the mercy of so many factors. A childcare facility in my area had to let go staff over the summer because a bus stopped coming. It experienced this bad luck. A bus stopped coming to the area which meant the after-school programme was gone and it had to let go staff. Everything had been put in place. There was a beautiful facility but the after-school service is gone because of a bus. There is this flexibility and volatility in the sector. A school would not have closed down because there would have been a need for it. We would have been able to create a mechanism to get the children to it and make sure it had the staff. The service hopes it can get the staff back in September but it is not sure.

My pitch for budget 2025 is to look after the sector, which is very important. We should create pathways whereby the State can come in and allow for public childcare. The Department of Education should be integrated with the Department of children with regard to future planning and supply management, and look at where we have certain numbers of houses. An entire village is being built in south Dundalk in the Haggardstown-Blackrock area. There is little to no childcare provision and 5,000 houses are being built. In north Drogheda a road has been built to facilitate thousands of houses but there are no childcare facilities. Future planning should include examining the population to see how we can do this.

It would serve our country very well to look after our children and educate them and make sure the professionals in the sector are taken care of and valued as educators. The women who looked after my children in early childhood were educators. The children still speak of them years later. They are a very important part of a child's education and social development. I would love to see the Department of children work far more closely with the Department of Education and the Department with responsibility for planning. I would like to see more integration.