Childcare Services Dail Éireann — 2026-04-23 ============================================================ Norma Foley (FF), Kerry I acknowledge the role of the city and county childcare committees. We are indebted to them for their expertise and the manner in which they provide engagement on the ground with local providers, both private and community. I give them a shout-out because we have 50 engagements taking place right across the country on developing phase 2 of our action plan. Part of the discussion or conversation is around education, particularly early years education. Those on-the-ground consultations are very important and, as I said, they are being facilitated by early learning and childcare committees. On the consultation, we have already had over 11,000 engagements online. There is, therefore, phenomenal interest in the whole area of early learning and childcare. The Deputy can be assured, through the city and county childcare committees, that every opportunity will be taken to advertise and promote the State-led and building blocks schemes to make people aware of the opportunities available to support them in the delivery of early learning and childcare. --- 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/2026-04-23/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:54:48+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-04-23