Cathy Bennett (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein)
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129. To ask the Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth the timeframe in which she intends to cap childcare costs at €200 per month. [32459/25]

Norma Foley (Kerry, Fianna Fail)
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The Programme for Government commits to “progressively reduce the cost of childcare to €200 per month per child.” This commitment will be achieved over the lifetime of the Government.Initial steps have already been taken. Earlier this month, I announced the introduction of maximum fee caps for all Partner Services in Core Funding from September 2025. The fee freeze will remain in place for all Partner Services with fees below these caps. This is an important step towards the reduction of early learning and childcare fees to €200 per month. Under the new fee caps, the highest possible fees will be no more than €295 per week for a full-day place of 40-50 hours per week. Once the National Childcare Scheme subsidy is taken into account, the maximum fee for a parent in this situation will be less than €200 per week.This latest measure builds on a range of supports already in place. The Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) Programme provides two years of pre-school without charge and has participation rates of 96%. Over 70% of families on low income report they could not send their child to pre-school without it. The National Childcare Scheme (NCS) complements ECCE, giving universal and targeted subsidies to reduce costs to parents. Recent improvements include the extension of the universal subsidy to children under 15 and two increases to the minimum hourly subsidy, now worth €96.30 per week for 45 hours.Almost 220,000 children benefited from a subsidy in 2024. Since last September, children in childminding settings can also benefit from National Childcare Scheme subsidies.In addition, the fee management system introduced through Core Funding has made sure the investment in affordability is not absorbed by unnecessary fee increases. Core Funding has enjoyed high participation rates to date, with 92 per cent of services taking part this year. Preparations for the first Estimates process for this Government are underway and I am committed to bringing forward proposals to make further progress in this area.

Work is also under way to develop an Action Plan to build an affordable, high-quality, accessible early learning and childcare system, informed by stakeholder consultation. This will set out future steps to reduce the cost of early learning and childcare further to €200 per month over the lifetime of the Government.