Sir, - Kathryn Holmquist's recent series of articles confirms parents' anxieties about the care of their children. In particular, the series points up a much ignored fact: that parents who do not work outside the home also require childcare. These parents form the main demand for sessional care and education, which IPPA members supply, and for which IPPA's pre-Budget submission demanded support.
IPPA, the Early Childhood Organisation, like all those other support organisations involved in producing the National Childcare Strategy, was precluded from discussing the plight of those parents by the terms of reference of the Expert Working Group on Childcare, which had been charged with devising the National Childcare Strategy.
For the Minister, on the very occasion of the launch of the strategy, to use the lack of a recommendation on that issue to refuse to implement any of the recommendations is disgraceful. Like many other under-funded and under-staffed voluntary organisations, IPPA committed staff and time we could not afford to this process, in the naive belief that, finally, children would begin to have their rights as citizens asserted in a national childcare strategy. The result? Childcare has not been helped one whit by 18 months of hard work.
Disadvantaged families and communities are also being ignored by the media response to the National Childcare Strategy. The recommendations of the strategy include several important supports for families who experience disadvantage and social exclusion. It is becoming a truism to state that quality childcare is of economic as well as social benefit to society. Many parents, as well as most childcare providers, are aware of the high-scope research which indicates a long-term economic return of the order of 7:1 on investment in quality childcare.
What may not be so well known is that that research was carried out in disadvantaged communities, which is one of its strongest selling points. Why then, does the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, regularly beset as he is with the legal consequences of early school-leaving - unemployment, delinquency, drug abuse and damaged families (all problems alleviated through investment in quality childcare) - not take the opportunities offered to him by his own report? Could it be that childcare is a long-term, national issue, and that politicians are concerned only with the short-term and local?
IPPA calls on the Government to acknowledge its responsibility to its youngest citizens and provide support both to parents and to providers of early childhood care and education. - Yours, etc., Hilary Kenny,
IPPA, North King Street, Dublin 7.