Childcare Services
Dail Éireann — 2021-10-07
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Paul Murphy (PBP), Dublin South-West

The figures are €638 million this year and €1 billion by 2028. These are inadequate sums. Families are spending 34% of household income on childcare, compared with 3% in Austria and 6% in Sweden, and that is despite childcare workers in many cases earning just the minimum wage. There is a crisis and the Government proposes, basically, to go back to normal. UNICEF recommends that spending on childcare and early childhood education should be equivalent to 1% of GDP. Given our inflated GDP, we might instead use GNI*, but €638 million represents just one third of 1% of GNI. Even €1 billion by 2028, and who knows whether we will ever get there, is still substantially short. It would need to be €1.8 billion to reach 1% of GNI*. The Government is failing the country's children, something that will leave them disadvantaged for life. At the very least, we should have a commitment to a national childcare service and to increasing funding to 1% of GNI*.

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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/2021-10-07/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:49:40+00:00
Sitting date: 2021-10-07