Paul Murphy: Demands Public National Childcare Service

I want to start with a quote from a parent who put it extremely well. Early years' childcare in Ireland seems broken. The staff themselves are poorly paid and move frequently. Parents have to pay exorbitant fees, which become even more challenging to fund if there is more than one child. The government needs to look at a more whole-scale change to the system. There are environmental and social impacts to families being forced to travel long distances to find creche places. There are also gender-based inequalities, as women are often forced to reduce hours or take leave from work in order to make childcare affordable. This has a significant impact on long-term earning potential. They summed it up. The current model of childcare is utterly broken and it is failing almost everybody involved. It is failing the workers, poorly paid, very high rates of turnover. It is failing the families who pray that they will find a place for their child, who sometimes cannot find a place until they are two or older and are then faced with paying another mortgage or another two mortgages to pay. It is failing them, and I will try and go into this later at the moment, where because of the privatised model, effectively multiple creches, I know multiple creches in my constituency, and I presume a significant number across the country, are saying to parents, parents, we are going to opt out of the core funding, and we are going to hike your fees by 35%, 40%, 50%, by an extraordinary amount, and are able to, like they have the parents over a barrel, they are able to hold effectively their children to ransom, and parents have no choice. It is failing many of the small operators, who are really, really struggling in terms of all the things they have to do in order to access core funding, in terms of the pressure of the bigger operators and so on. The only ones it is working for is the big chains who are making enormous profits, figures came out about that recently. Unfortunately, what we have before us today in terms of what the government is doing, what they are planning to do, in terms of Sinn Fein's motion, is it is just attempting to build on this completely failed model. From the point of view of the Sinn Fein motion, we support it, obviously we welcome people's childcare costs coming down, but it just involves throwing more money at this privatised model, and not getting to the root of the problem. It is all very well for the Minister to kind of try and criticise the Sinn Fein motion from the left, than to say we need to have public childcare, but Minister, you are responsible for the current model, there is no indication of a public childcare model, the whole system is built around public money for a privatised model. That is the fundamental problem, that is what needs to be addressed. The best way to deal with this is to establish a publicly owned and operated national childcare service. We launched our policy on this last year, it outlines it very, very clearly, it should be operated completely free of charge, just like primary school and secondary education are operated. There is no reason why preschool should be different, it should be available to all children equally, regardless of where they live, whether they have additional needs or how rich or poor their parents are. That is how we cherish all the children of the nation equally. That is why we support the launch tomorrow of the Alliance for a Public System of Early Childhood Education and Care. It is crucial that childcare is provided as a publicly owned and operated service, and not outsourced to private providers, as it has been until now. It is about respecting childcare workers as the essential public servants that they are, with wages and conditions on a par with teachers, and ensuring that therefore every child gets quality childcare. The century of appalling abuse perpetrated in primary and secondary schools by the Catholic Church, so shows the danger of the State outsourcing its responsibility for educating our children. It is not that long since the State started outsourcing early childhood care and education to the private sector, but already we have a lengthening litany of abuse. Earlier this year, the High Court approved awards of €615,000 to 40 very young children who were mistreated by the hide-and-seek creche chain. The creches were understaffed, leading to neglect. Children were left in dirty nappies and left to go hungry, apparently so the owners could cut costs and make higher profits. Three quarters of childcare services in this country are run for profit at the moment. Earlier this week, we heard reports of physical and verbal abuse of two and three-year-olds at a charity-run creche in South Dublin. Children's heads were slapped, their legs hit, a child with sensory issues was force-fed until they vomited, and tiny little kids were called abusive names. It would really make your heart break. Of course, it should go without saying that the vast majority of childcare services are not abusive. Every day, tens of thousands of parents trust them to mind our children, to make sure that they are well, look after, and you see it for yourself, the care that the childcare workers have for your children. But far too often, going above and beyond is what childcare workers are forced to do, because of inadequate resources and inadequate government support. A survey carried out by CIP2 earlier this year found that 68% of workers felt pressure due to staff shortages, was a big issue, 65% cited stress and burnout, and staff turnover is running at 25%. The major reason for all of this is very low pay for childcare workers, pay as low as £13.65 an hour, so it is not surprising that 86% identified low pay as the biggest work issue, 95% saying they are only able to make ends meet with difficulty or great difficulty. And why are the wages so low? According to a report by Task in 2020, quote, the single most important factor in lowering the pay and conditions of care work is the extent to which it is marketised. So, in other words, the reason pay is so low is that creche workers can make higher profits. The lower the wages, the higher the profits. There does seem to be, I will finish off on this, a rip-off of parents. We have numerous complaints, numerous emails in my constituency about sudden and very large increases. One creche, Rathvarnum Daycare informed parents that it is leaving the core funding scheme, increasing its fees between €300 and €350 per month per child, saying we do not have the money, this is why we need to do so. When parents looked at its accounts, they found €1.6 million had been paid to directors in 2022, and that over €200,000 have been declared in profit in 2023. And yet the Minister answers to say that they are still in the core funding scheme. It is another example of why we need a proper public national childcare service. Thank you.