Childcare Services Dail Éireann — 2024-02-29 ============================================================ Roderic O'Gorman (GP), Dublin West The building blocks programme was in three parts. Last year, in the first part, the grants available were for those upgrades. We had €9 million available for those upgrades. This year, our focus is on the expansion of existing services, so the grants available this year are to expand existing services. We have €18 million for that. In 2025, the grants available will be for new services. I do not have the final line of sight on that, but I think that will be in excess of €20 million. We are looking at it in steps. The first step was upgrade, the second step was expansion and the third step is funding for brand new services. That is the biggest piece in supporting new services, in particular community services. We are doing a bit of work in identifying areas of greatest need because there will be criteria for new services in looking to support areas where there is significant pressure on existing services. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2024-02-29/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:52:44+00:00 Sitting date: 2024-02-29