Childcare Services
Dail Éireann — 2026-06-25
============================================================

Maeve O'Connell (FG), Dublin Rathdown

I am glad to hear about the nature of the viability of facilities because, unfortunately, one of the issues that is occurring is that as developments are put in place they provide facilities for childcare but it is often an empty shell. It is not necessarily fit for purpose for that particular community. We also have the issue, particularly in already dense urban areas where apartment developments are going in, of increasing the level of the local population when we do not have the childcare spaces to meet the demand of the existing population.
In growing urban areas, in particular, having 20 childcare places per 75 homes is something we need to look at urgently. We certainly need to look at it in the short term and, in the long term, we need to build some type of flexibility into the system, an adaptation over time, if perhaps we do not need as many spaces in future. For now, we do need to be moving to a more realistic ratio of childcare places to homes as we increasingly urbanise.

---

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/2026-06-25/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:54:51+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-06-25