Great. That is why we have announced the €25 million for next year in terms of building blocks. That will be important. We are focusing that building blocks investment on services that will be offered to one- to three-year-olds, recognising the particular challenge at that end, even before we get into the ECCE side of things. That is where our big challenge is now. When it comes to increasing capacity, a number of speakers spoke to the Child Care (Amendment) Bill, which we discussed in the Seanad just a couple of w…

I thank Senators for inviting me and the Minister, Deputy McEntee, to speak on the topic of migration. Conflict, persecution and violence are forcing a record number of people around the world to flee their homes. Just last month, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, UNHCR, reported that the overall number of people forced to flee their homes in such circumstances rose to 120 million. This is double the figure for 2014 just ten years previously. Listening to the news, it would sometimes be easy to feel that all t…

I will sit in for a while.

I thank the Deputy. What we are looking to do is to support people who have been given status in this country to access the services and housing supports that everybody else in this country is entitled to do. That is why we have provided very significant resources over the last number of years, working with housing NGOs to put in place officers who are directly engaging with people who have status and are now entitled to use HAP to be on social housing lists. We have had very significant success in that already. La…

The Deputy is right that, for two years, the hotel in question has served as accommodation for Ukrainian families. They have been supported and integrated into the community. Our need for Ukrainian accommodation is less now and our need for accommodation for international protection applicants is higher. In light of that, we made a decision, in agreement with the provider there, that this accommodation will now provide accommodation for international protection applicant families. I have no doubt Deputy McGrath wil…

We have provided information about the change of use in this particular case. I am happy to speak to the Deputy further about this. Families from Ukraine are leaving and families from other countries and difficult parts of the world are arriving. I hope we can extend the same degree of welcome.

The purpose of this Bill is to ensure that Tusla, the Child and Family Agency, has the appropriate enforcement powers to address serious non-compliance with regulations for early years services and that parents have access to information on the quality of those services. The intention is not to increase enforcement action, but to make it more effective, address some of the limitations of the current legislation and thereby improve overall compliance within the sector. The Bill will also remove the current exemption…

There was loads of debate.

I thank the Deputies for their contributions. I am not able to accept Deputy Sherlock's amendment but I hope that what I am about to say will explain why. The impact of what he is proposing and where he has located the amendment may be wider than he intends. Perhaps I can also provide some words of comfort. As we recall from last week, the purpose of this Bill is twofold. One element is to ensure that Tusla's early years inspectorate has appropriate enforcement powers across all childcare settings and not just chil…

I thank the Deputies for their kind remarks to me and their very detailed and considered contributions to this debate today and yesterday. Childminding happens in Blanchardstown and all over Dublin. It is a phenomenon that happens all over the country. Childminders support so many families and children. Deputy Fitzmaurice is right that some of is because of the pressure on services. Some of it is because of the flexibility they provide. Some of it is just because some parents prefer that. Other parents do not want …

I move "That the Bill be now read a Second Time." The purpose of this Bill is to ensure that Tusla, the Child and Family Agency, has the appropriate enforcement powers to address serious non-compliance with regulations for early years services and to ensure that parents have access to information in relation to the quality of those services. The intention is not to increase enforcement action but to make it more effective and address some of the limitations of the current legislation, and as such improve overall co…

I thank the Acting Chair. I welcome the proposal by the Minister for Justice, and I and my Department look forward to working with her and across Government on its implementation. Ireland, like many other European countries, is experiencing a significant increase in the number of people seeking international protection. The arrival numbers remain significantly elevated. Up to mid-June of this year, over 10,000 people had arrived in Ireland seeking international protection from the State. The average in 2022 and 202…

I thank the Deputy for raising this matter. From his engagement and that of other Deputies from Cork I am well aware of the issues facing Northside Community Enterprise and of the funding that is required to support the reopening of the Before 5 Family Centre in Churchfield. The centre is in an area of undersupply and of high need for childcare places. The ambition of Northside Community Enterprise to reopen this centre, with an expanded offering of full-time, full-year places for children under three, as well as p…

I do not accept the Deputy's assertion that it is moving at a snail's pace. We are looking to create a new funding stream that will deal with situations like this where there is an existing service that is using a building that is no longer fit for purpose and requires significant capital support. That requires my Department to engage with the Department of Public Expenditure, NDP Delivery and Reform to create a new capital stream. As with so much in the bureaucracy of Departments, I wish this would move so much fa…

When I was in Cork I sought the meeting with Northside Community Enterprise in order to be able to discuss the need for particular support to get this service reopened. I was able to see the amazing work it has done in other services and understand the particular ethos behind the organisation as a community organisation. This is something we in the Department want to support. I outlined the challenges we faced in terms of creating a brand new stream of funding to meet the organisation's particular needs. I also mad…

As the Deputy knows, on 27 March 2024, the Government agreed a new comprehensive accommodation strategy, CAS, for international protection applicants. This has a twofold aim. The immediate aim is to deal with the situation where we are not able to offer accommodation to everybody right now, and a significant number of people were sleeping rough on our streets. The secondary aim, as the Deputy said, was to move away from that massive over-reliance on the commercial sector and have a core of State-owned accommodation…

I agree with much of what the Deputy said. We have to remember we are rebuilding our international protection system in real time. For years we were not getting anywhere close to the European average for international protection applicants. Since 2022 we have been getting the average, but our system was not built for those numbers. We are having to rebuild the processing system. The Minister, Deputy McEntee, has done really important work. In my Department, we are rebuilding the accommodation system. It is importan…

The comprehensive accommodation strategy is to run until 2028. The vision set out in my answer of 13,000 beds and the various elements is something we wish to achieve by 2028. We have already taken significant steps in the use of State land. That has been a huge change. There is the site at Crooksling, County Dublin, and at Trudder, County Wicklow, where we are now accommodating a significant number of applicants. They are initially being accommodated in tents, but we will look to upgrade the accommodation to prefa…

I thank the Deputy for raising this matter. Core funding has been in operation since 15 September 2022 and has achieved significant successes in terms of the high level of participation we are seeing. Right now, 4,632 services nationwide are eligible to partake in the core funding scheme. Of those, 4,369 are partner services, meaning 267 services have not signed up to core funding. We allocated €259 million to core funding in the first year, in which there was a 95% uptake. We grew core funding in year 2 to €287 mi…

There were a couple of questions there. We have some information about black spots, mainly through the city and county childcare committees. We have just set up a new unit in our Department, a bit like the forward planning unit in the Department of Education, very much designed around a better understanding of where pressure spots are, and we are feeding that information into local authorities for their development plans in order that they might be able to designate more areas as potentially available for childcare…