Childcare: Motion Seanad Éireann — 2026-09-23 ============================================================ Cathal Byrne (FG), Cultural and Educational Panel It is good to see the Minister of State in Seanad Éireann again. I want to commend our Fianna Fáil colleagues on putting a very important motion before us this evening. It is important to recognise that while there are obviously policy differences between different parties and different Members of the Seanad, there is no doubt in my mind that childcare, looking after and supporting young children, and making sure they are looked after is an issue that is above party politics. Really it is about ensuring that those children, who have to be at the heart of the conversation, have access in their local area to a childcare facility or childminder and that the families those children are part of are able to get out and get back into the workforce. It is really important that when we have these conversations, we keep that to the very forefront. I am going to make a number of brief points because quite a lot of this issue has already been well covered. Specifically, it is important to recognise the contribution that childminders make right across the country. Perhaps it is more of a rural thing than urban thing. It is important that in the upcoming budget, we see additional supports to support childminders themselves. Quite a lot of the conversation tends to revolve around large crèche facilities, but there is a large cohort of people who look after children in their own homes. It is important that we support them to do that while not over-regulating them to the point that they decide it is not worth getting into it the following year. My second point is around the whole area of the ECCE scheme and how the ECCE scheme is being rolled out. It is quite a good model, but it could probably be extended. There are quite a lot of children who are in the ECCE scheme for the two years but really are in a crèche early. In my area of Wexford, one of the biggest challenges people come to me with is access to a crèche for very young children. If their mother wants to go back to work after six months or a year, can they actually find a childcare space? There would be one when that child turns two or two and a half, but there is not one when they are six months old or up to two years old. Perhaps there is an opportunity in the ECCE scheme to try to address that if we want to support mothers in particular to get back to work. It is important to acknowledge it is mothers in this entire conversation. It tends to be the mother who takes time off work to look after the children. That is the lived reality of so many women up and down the country. If we want to support them, maybe the ECCE scheme is a good working model to do that. The third and final point I want to make about this is that I have been a believer for quite a long time in the importance of a State-led model. We have had State-provided primary education for quite a long time and State-provided secondary education. I think we are ultimately going to have to make a giant leap forward beyond even what is envisaged in the programme for Government towards a State-provided model of childcare. Ultimately, that is where this entire thing is going. While there will always be a role for private providers, community providers and childminders, I think the State needs to take greater involvement in the sector as a whole. --- 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/seanad/2026-09-23/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-09-28T05:50:49+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-09-23