The number of words written about childcare must be well into the millions by now. Yet the debate has not progressed. If the words were a book on child development, then Ireland could be stuck at the chapter on potty-training. It is time to move off the pot.
Childcare, like potty-training, is not a compelling issue. The political response to it resembles an inexperienced carer's behaviour at such a trying time. Rather than risk an accident, the Government dashes between pillar and post hoping someone, somewhere will find a solution which results in least spillage over the greatest area. Oops, the childcare issue is threatening to burst again.
The facts before the social partners when they meet again on Monday are stark. The number of mothers in the workforce now exceeds the population of a large Irish city such as Limerick or Galway. These workers are left without the equivalent of a road infrastructure on which to travel to their jobs in safety. Costs of childcare for younger children run parallel to the monthly repayments due on an average mortgage. Yet parents neither receive the equivalent of a first time buyer's grant, nor the benefits of a section 23 tax break.
In the days of a family wage, households could survive on one income. Its demise makes it virtually essential now for families to rely on two, if they can. The rise in house prices, and the lack of regulation in the rental sector, make it just as important to plan on the basis that either or both parents, whether living together or not, have paid work. Job security is not an available option. Short-term contracts and portfolio working lives are the pattern now, a trend no parent or would-be parent can ignore.
Economic straitjackets are not forced on us by a desire to have fast cars and foreign holidays and meals out three times a week. They are an unstoppable consequence of the deregulated global market forces we embrace. Words and phrases like love or future generations sound old-fashioned in that context because social policy has to fight so hard to make its voice heard in the current jungle. Underneath the well-wrought arguments, these are the feelings and concerns people voice.
BUT when we tell the Government we love our children, and how we want flexible working hours, it doesn't listen. I suspect that even now, no Government minister understands why so many people found the last Budget so offensive. Last week's trotting out of how it is being congratulated by the EU for the tax individualisation policy suggests ministers still believe that problems of perception brought the Budget into disrepute. They still don't understand. Tax individualisation makes definite sense if, and only if, the principle is extended to the social welfare system too. It is the touchstone of a fair social policy, and of any childcare policy built on such principles. Had that integration happened last year, home workers would have been better acknowledged than was the case when the derisory stay-home spouse's allowance had to be introduced to shut them up.
Feelings run high, understandably. The social revolution implied is arguably the first time that human beings have had to ask themselves how to negotiate their parenthood in the context of the public world. No one knows the answer; the risk of getting it wrong is so frightening that politicians may wish the whole debate would go away. But using rows about competing parenting styles as an excuse to delay a mature acknowledgment of the childcare issue is becoming a threadbare strategy. People can't wait much longer.
What the debate does not address is that parenting and paid employment aren't fixed positions any more. Home changes, as does work. The Government has introduced some measures to improve what it irritatingly calls the supply side of childcare, as if the issue were as static as a multi-storey car park. Had the package been more effective, we might by now be discussing the wisdom of various options from a child-centred point of view.
With inflation rising at its current rate, many of the social partners feel more at home bandying those arguments around than seriously addressing the issue. Inflation is an old problem, with a language and set of negotiating stances set by years of tradition, and it does hit families most of all. You can feel its effects simply by doing a weekly shop.
THE actual costs of childcare have hit families harder than even the 5 per cent plus rise in basic living costs. If childcare is ignored again for the want of some considered leadership, union bosses will bear the same level of responsibility for failing as do the Taoiseach, the Tanaiste and the Minister for Finance. Like politicians, they can rest assured that working parents will withdraw support if they continue to play peekaboo with the urgent themes in people's lives.
We can't move on to discussing child-centred childcare because the day-to-day problems of finding childcare, assessing and paying for it are still so urgent. We're building cities, while politicians, labour and business leaders stand transfixed at the sight of a child's pot.
In the absence of a parent wage, benefit or credit, the collective failure of the social partners to understand the issue extends to the way they persist in describing childcare as a lifestyle issue. It is not. Childcare addresses not an optional extra we can access like we do a banking service on the Internet, but the very stuff of who and what we are. Lifestyle, on the contrary, is where Mother Hubbard's granddaughter moves from an old shoe into a kitten-heeled mule.
mruane@irish-times.ie