Sir, – Your columnist John FitzGerald correctly notes that increased investment in childcare would help to solve the "high cost" childcare problem currently preventing parents, usually mothers, from returning to paid employment ("Encouraging more women into the workforce would benefit economy", Business Opinion, May 11th).
The social irony is that joint spouse or partner workplace participation is no longer a right or a choice – effectively, for many couples struggling to pay daft mortgages and daft childcare costs, it’s now financially mandatory.
Ireland’s drearily predictable housing bubbles and related rental sector chaos are in part a product of a rentier capitalism mono-culture which disdains the regulatory facilitation of lifetime renting (with, for example, only index-linked price rises), the large-scale provision of public housing and sensible controls on mortgage lending (such as capping lending at 2.5 times the lead household salary).
The political irony is that the high cost of privatised baby warehousing is now constraining wider private-sector growth.
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If there is a move away from viewing babyhood as a profit opportunity, it will not be motivated by any concern for families or for children but will be driven by the interests of the wider private sector trumping the increasingly inconvenient interests of the childcare industry. – Yours, etc,
SEÁN MacCANN,
Trillick,
Co Tyrone.