Funding for community childcare will increase next year, Minister of State for Children Brendan Smith has insisted.
He said yesterday that the Government's proposed new subvention scheme had been widely portrayed as a cutback in funding for the community sector and for disadvantaged parents and their children.
"Nothing could be further from the case and the new scheme has been given a total funding allocation of €153 million over three years," said the Minister.
"This means that in 2008, some €47 million will be available to the new scheme, while €37.25 million was available under the EOCP staffing scheme in 2007."
Mr Smith said that the substantial increase in funding was intended to ensure that the greatest number of children and parents using community-based childcare services would benefit.
"The truth is that, in the absence of sufficiently hard data to enable my office to accurately quantify and cost a more generous scheme under the new, more transparent arrangements, it was decided to identify the most disadvantaged categories of parents at the outset.
"Clearly, we could not disregard these parents and start at higher income levels but, equally, we could not commit to a scheme which goes beyond the most disadvantaged categories until we are in a position to accurately quantify and cost the outcome."
Mr Smith was responding to a Fine Gael Private Member's motion.
Party spokesman on children Alan Shatter claimed the Government had shown "stunning incompetence" when announcing that the scheme would become fully operational in July of next year.
"I acknowledge that the new scheme will benefit a small percentage of community childcare services, particularly in some disadvantaged areas of Dublin, where a substantial portion of parents are recipients of social welfare or family income supplement.
"However, it will also have a profoundly detrimental impact on parents, children and on the vast majority of community childcare services established on a not-for-profit basis throughout the country.
"The question must be asked if the Government is attempting to implement a surreptitious one -child-per-family policy such as exists at present in China," asked Mr Shatter.
