The allocation of €30 million in new funding to the early education sector could deliver 3,000 new childcare places for families and provide a model for wider public delivery, a campaign alliance said on Wednesday.
At the launch of its Roadmap to Public Childcare, the Together for Public alliance, which includes the National Women’s Council (NWC), Siptu and more than 30 other groups, called for the money to be made available, in this year’s budget, for a pilot project.
The group sees the pilot as potentially paving the way to a system in which the Government plays a direct role in providing a proportion of places, especially in areas of the country where there are particular shortages.
However, it said it was not advocating for the elimination of private providers, especially small or locally owned ones, describing these as “the backbone” of the current system.
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It said the Government should, however, take on the payment of all the sector’s wages as a way reducing costs to parents and addressing staffing issues.
The group said such a move would have the potential to reduce the average cost of places to €59 a week, only slightly above the €200 a month promised to be delivered over the term of the Government.
Increased Government involvement and support would benefit families across society by making childcare more affordable while progressing gender equality and helping those living in poverty get out of it, the meeting heard.
“Any lone parent will tell you they’ve been pressured by the social welfare system to take up employment,” said Gayle Smith, a lone parent who works with Treoir, a part of the alliance. “And when they say, ‘I don’t have childcare’, there is no understanding of their circumstances.
“Our social welfare system is not designed to lift people out of poverty, so the only way that families can do that is to seek employment, and lone parents want to work. Who wants to raise their children in poverty? Nobody.
“But I think of myself when I went back to education ... I have a teenager now, so I’m past that childcare stage, but it never leaves you, that anxiety … thinking first of all, ‘Who’s going to mind the child?’.”
NWC executive director Corrinne Hasson said: “We don’t want the Government to just buy properties, which it seems to be doing, and put in providers. We want them to take action, go one step further and deliver the care.”
Gráinne McKenna, head of DCU’s school of language, literacy and early childhood education, said significant progress had been made in the sector over the past seven years with a doubling of public funding.
However, she said it needed to double again, from €1.48 billion, to catch up with other comparable European states and deliver the level of service required at a cost families can afford.
McKenna said the current core funding system was a good one, “but it remains underfunded and this is a good thing to spend money on”.
“But what we are talking about here is not about a drip feed of funding over the term of a five-year programme for government. It actually requires a 10 to 20-year strategy where we commit to adequate levels of investment, where we commit to the State being leaders like in health and housing,” she said.
