As many as one Irish child in four under the age of nine is being physically cared for, morally influenced and psychologically formed by a childminding industry which is unregulated, unmonitored and virtually ignored by the State. This figure is confirmed by a draft report commissioned by the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform from Goodbody Economic Consultants. According to informed sources, the report estimates that there are nearly 40,000 childminders working in the Republic today. About 26,000 of these childcare providers are minding other people's children in their own homes and about 13,000 are minding children in the children's homes. In addition there are a minimum of 3,000 formal childcare providers: predominantly playgroups, but also creches, day-care centres, after-school programmes and Montessori schools. The draft report conservatively estimates that 80,000 children are being cared for by childminders and a further 45,000 are being cared for by formal childcare providers. Therefore, at least 125,000 Irish children - out of a total population of 550,000 children aged between 0 and nine - are at the mercy of an informal, ad hoc, largely black economy industry which relies entirely on the goodwill of childminders and the vigilance of parents for the protection of children.
But while working parents may be preoccupied with the childcare issue, it only reaches the public arena when something horrendous happens. Last week's revelations that a British infant, six-month-old Joseph Mackin, was shaken to death by Helen Stacey (41), who tabloids relished describing as an "evil baby-kill minder", was yet another example of how the issue is reduced to a 48-hour media event before being quickly forgotten. Then it emerged that an Australian nanny, Louise Sullivan (26), has now been charged with murder following the death of sixmonth-old Caroline Jongen.
While the Sullivan case has yet to be heard, the Stacey trial exposed the fact that Stacey was a registered childminder who had lied about her past as a prostitute and about her mental health problems in order to get on to an approved local authority list. In Britain, media commentators have been beating their breasts over how such an unstable character could have "slipped through the net". In the Republic, there isn't even a "net" to slip through. Anyone can be a childminder here. There is no statutory, regulatory, monitoring body for childminders. There are no Garda checks, no medical screening and no interviewing by anyone other than parents. Nor is there any system of psychological testing, as there is in Finland, to assess a person's suitability to mind children at the most vulnerable stage in their development.
Patricia Murray, chief executive of the National Childminding Association of Ireland, believes that childminders should be rigorously regulated and she is concerned that, in the absence of State registration and regulations, a Helen Stacey-style attack on a baby "could happen here". Of course it could. On January 11th, 1996, an Irish childminder shook an 18-month-old baby boy so severely that he suffered brain haemorrhages. In court, the accused admitted to three previous episodes in which she had shaken the baby. In January of this year, the accused was given a 12-month suspended prison term at Castlepollard District court. Fortunately the baby did not die and the prognosis was "very good for a full recovery". Still, it's the kind of story that keeps the parents of new babies lying awake at night worrying about how they will be able to find a trustworthy caretaker for their precious infant so the mother can return to the job that she loves, or they need to help pay the mortgage on the exorbitantly priced three-bedroom semi-d they've purchased in the far-off suburbs.
There are no easy, soundbite answers to the childcare crisis. And it is a crisis. Last week the National Childminding Association put out an urgent call for women to consider the career: the Celtic Tiger has increased the demand for childcare places 10-fold, yet calls to the organisation by parents seeking childminders outnumber available childminders by at least two to one. Thanks to the economic boom, a plentiful supply of well-paid jobs is enticing many good childminders into other, better-paid careers.
Ask any mother looking for childcare and she will tell you how hard it is: creches have long waiting lists and some nanny agencies have 10 families vying for the services of every one nanny that comes on to their books. The fear of everyone concerned is that if childminding remains a low-status, low-paid occupation, it will begin to attract people who seek to do the job only for the money. The National Childminding Association believes that if training and standards were required, it would encourage those who are "out for a quick buck" to "self-select" themselves out of the career. Some childminders voluntarily register with the association, which requires medical clearance for membership. But many childminders are reluctant to register even with this voluntary group because they fear being made known to the Revenue Commissioners, although the association says that it never supplies names to the State. Avoidance of tax is also behind the worrying fact that the health boards are not being notified by childminders who are caring for four children under the age of six or more, as is required under law. (Childminders caring for three or fewer children are not required to "notify".) It is understood that in most health boards only "one or two" childminders have come forward.
This required notification is, however, no more than that. It simply means that the childminder gives her name to the health board, but nothing else is required of her. (The health boards are gradually checking the health and safety aspects of the premises of creches which notify.) Notification is not the same as registration and regulation and it does not apply to children over the age of six. But who cares? Before parents and politicians start gnashing their teeth over the deaths of babies such as Joseph Mackin, Caroline Jongen and Matthew Eappen, they need to look into their own hearts and ask themselves, why do we have the worst childcare provision in Europe? And why do we put up with it year after year? Why do we allow childminding to remain a lowpaid, low-status occupation? It's only when the problem begins to hit the pockets of big business that anyone cares - and now it is. Partnership 2000 is concerned that while jobs are being created up and down the country, women cannot take up the jobs if they have no one to care for their children. The issue has become a hot political potato as well, with Taoiseach Bertie Ahern venturing the promise, during the last general election campaign, of tax breaks for working parents who pay for childcare. Lobbyists from various quarters in the childcare business soon convinced him that the solution isn't that simple. So now the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform has set up an 80member expert working group on childcare under Partnership 2000.
The group is looking at the problem in a holistic way, realising that there are no easy answers, that a co-ordinated framework is required and that the whole thing is going to cost millions of pounds. Goodbody's draft report is one of a number of research documents being considered by the group.
Due to report at the end of the year, the expert working group is investigating such issues as regulation, training and qualifications; resourcing and sustaining childcare in rural areas and areas of urban deprivation; early education of the pre-school child; the rights and needs of children; finances, employment and taxation; and equality of access.
"Women have been crying out for this for years, but it's only when the job market needs the women that anything is done," says Patricia Murray, who is a member of the working group. She has watched with growing impatience as the childminding area has been allowed to remain in the "grey area" of the unregulated black economy. She believes that the Revenue Commissioners hold the key to opening the area to scrutiny and regulation. In her view, it's not equitable to make childcare more affordable to parents by offering tax deductions, when childminders are being exploited at rates as low as £1.50 an hour, then asked to pay 42 per cent tax because their working husbands have already used up all the family's tax allowances. Nor is it fair to bolster two-career families, while families in which one parent has chosen to remain full-time in the home struggle on one income.
Murray's solution would be to give all parents of children under 13 a generous child benefit payment. They could use this to pay for childcare, or to enable one parent to remain in the home full-time to care for the children. In addition, childminders should receive a tax-free allowance per childcare place offered in recognition of the fact that they are providing a social service. Researchers at the Dublin Institute of Technology's Centre for Social and Educational Research have also made suggestions to the expert working group. They were commissioned by one of the subgroups to complete an overview of the national and international literature on family daycare, and looking specifically at the issue of childminding in Ireland compared to Portugal, Finland and Britain. They have interviewed childminders and talked to parents who use childminders.
Top of the list of the DIT researchers' recommendations, which are being considered by the subgroup, is registration, in which childminders would have to meet certain criteria - including training - and be inspected and approved. The report recommends that this would work only if childminders had an incentive to register, since to do so would be to make themselves known to the Revenue Commissioners. To encourage registration, childminders would be entitled to capital grants for improvements, modifications of homes and equipment grants. They would be entitled to a weekly tax free allowance to cover expenses. Instead of being seen as the "little wife" in the home bolstering the family income, they would be regarded as self-employed people and obliged to register with the Revenue Commissioners. Using the Back to Work Allowance scheme as a model, the Revenue Commissioners would not fully tax the childminders until they were up and running for a certain number of years, so that they would have a safety net while sorting out their tax status.
The DIT report also recommends that the successful regulation of the B & B sector could be used as a model for regulating childminding. The health boards could subcontract the job of regulation and monitoring to an independent monitoring body; just as B & Bs which achieve certain standards receive green shamrocks, childminders who have been approved would be entitled to some other symbol of their approved status. It's a good idea, but it also underlines the horrendous truth that our B&Bs are better-regulated than our childcare system.