When the home pregnancy-test is positive, the first phone call many working mothers make isn't to their own mothers, their partners, their doctors, their best friends - it's to the local creche. Booking a creche place for baby in utero may sound like a joke, but it is deadly serious for parents who need to keep working outside the home while also rearing a young family.
Competition for creche places in Dublin is so intense that parents who secure places for unborn children must be willing to pay for them as soon as they become available, even if the infant is not yet ready to use the place. Creche-owners are not being greedy: the economics of the business are so tight that every place must be filled all the time for the creche to operate successfully.
Creche places are so prized that parents who already have one child are almost afraid to even think about having a second, never mind a third. It's not unknown for mothers to discreetly liaise with creche-owners as to the timing of conception, so that the new sibling's arrival can be timed with the opening of a place in the creche where the older child is already happy and settled.
"A teacher with two children, who wanted a third, asked me if this was a good time for her to get pregnant in light of any openings I would have in a year's time," one creche owner told The Irish Times - and she wasn't the first with such a tale of pre-conceptual booking.
Attempting to book a creche place not just during pregnancy, but before conception? It may sound crazy, but for many parents securing good childcare is a matter of economic survival when two incomes are needed to pay the mortgage.
"I have had mothers in tears on the phone begging for a place," says Anne Healy, of Sharavogue in Glenageary Co Dublin. "They may have booked six to eight months before they go back to work, but nothing has, unfortunately, become available. I have even been offered double fees (which would amount to £250 a week in the case of Sharavogue). I could have filled all 155 places in my creche three times in the past year, the need is so great. But the way things are, with new regulations and high salaries, running a creche is just not economic." Mary-Lee Stapleton, national adviser at the National Children's Nurseries Association, listens daily to parents' urgent cries for creche places. "The major dilemma is the daily, constant ringing of the phone and having to tell parents there are no places. I get five calls a day - that would be average. "It's very stressful not only for parents, but also for creche workers. If it was purely a business, you would be so excited about having that many company-calls for your service. But childcare is so totally different. You are coping with parents and children in dire and immediate need on a very emotive issue and you can't do anything for them."
In many creches, nurseries and playgroups, waiting lists for childcare are full until the year 2001. Many creches will no longer take babies, because the labour-intensive care of an infant is economically unviable if creches are to comply with the regulations of the Childcare Act, 1991, which is currently being enforced by health boards.
"Mothers are putting letters through doors looking for people to mind their babies. How do you check quality in a situation like that?" asks Hilary Kenny of the Irish Pre-school Playgroups Association. Creches are closing down when the owners cannot find the finance to invest in their premises in order to meet the regulations. Meanwhile, parents can only be expected to pay so much: in Dublin, the rate ranges from £100£125 for a child a week on the south side, and from £60£70 and up on the north side. Staffing costs make the difference. "Childcare workers of high calibre are nearly impossible to find," says Healy. "The rates of pay do not reward the two to three years in college required to become qualified, when there are so many other kinds of employment available."
Due to the combined pressures of capital and staffing costs, two good National Children Nursery Association creches have closed recently in Dublin for this reason. One creche, in the centre of Dublin, closed without notice, leaving parents, babies and toddlers stunned on the footpath. The owner hadn't had the courage to face the parents directly.
The children were wrenched from their daily routine and the parents were in a panic: "Without the support of a creche, both parents cannot work; without two incomes, you cannot pay the mortgage - no mortgage, no home," as one parent put it.
The crisis in the lack of creche places is not just a problem for relatively welloff parents. It can be even worse for parents who are unemployed and would like to work. In Darndale, one of the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods on the north side of Dublin, the four local childcare facilities have waiting lists of more than double the number of children currently being taken care of, according to the report Childcare on the Northside - Supporting Children and Parents, produced by the Northside Partnership. None of the creches on the partnership's database has a vacancy and in many cases they have waiting lists for the years 2000 and 2001.
And it's not only parents who are feeling the effects of the lack of government action on the childcare crisis, which has been brewing for the past decade. Seven out of 10 employers are having recruitment difficulties or are losing staff because parents cannot get quality childcare places.
When Ann Healy and Una Balfe, also of Sharavogue, advertised in The Irish Times for their new childcare consultancy, Corporate Childcare Consultants, to help employers develop creches for their workers, they got 12 calls in the first three days alone. The Northside Partnership says 20 per cent of employers in the partnership's Jobsmatch project said potential employees had refused to accept positions because of childcare issues. Eight of 20 participants on a telesales training course provided recently through the partnership, dropped out of the course due to a lack of childcare.
In a society where one in three children lives in poverty, keeping parents out of the job market through lack of government action on childcare is daft, to say the least.
Some employers are trying to be more flexible to help parents combine child-rearing with careers - but without flexible childcare, parents still have a problem. Once parents secure for their children full-time places in creches, they have no flexibility to slip in and out of the workplace. If they take parental leave, they must either continue to pay the weekly creche fee or lose the place. "What's the point of parental leave if parents can't afford to take it?" Anne Healy asks.
Many parents - mothers with young children especially - would prefer to work part-time, but they cannot find part-time childcare in the regulated creche industry. They must either pay for a full-time place in a creche or find another parent to share the place with. One creche tell of a mother who sends her toddler to one creche Monday to Wednesday, then to another on Thursday and Friday - and apparently, such an arrangement is not unusual as many parents patch together childcare arrangements combining different forms of paid and unpaid care.
The creche crisis is not just a Dublin problem. Three creches have closed in Navan alone recently because they could not comply with the new regulations, according to Denise McCormilla, national playgroups advisor, IPPA, Cavan and director of the Border Counties Childcare Network. "I see parents and children in dire need of childcare," says McCormilla, who was a member of the Partnership 2000: Expert Working Group on Childcare, which delivered its National Childcare Strategy to the Minister for Justice Equality and Law Reform, Mr O'Donoghue in January. "Parents under pressure to find a place for their child are turning to the black market or to the first person they find, even though they may have doubts. If you do not have choice, you are not making an uninformed decision," says McCormilla.
"I know people are putting children into creches and other situations that are not the best for them, while at the same time the regulations are closing down some very good childminders," Healy says.
More good creches will continue to close - reducing the overall number of creche places - until the Government invests in them with something like a grant for each child, combined with an ongoing support grant, she says. "They need to do it now. It is the men in suits who are making these decisions and they do not understand what parents are going through to find creche places, and they do not understand that childcare is so important that there must be investment in it. If things happen properly when a child is young, there's going to be a pay-off in the future to society."
Until something is done - and fast - the situation is only going to get worse. Today, 42 per cent of mothers of children under 15 work outside the home and the proportion of women working outside the home is set to increase by 25 per cent in the next 10 years. There are 146,000 children in paid childcare - 17 per cent of all children aged nine and younger. By 2010, there will be at least another 40,000 and as many as 80,000 more children in need of childcare.
