A lateral-thinking associate believes the best way to tackle the childcare problem is to fly a dozen children off to the McEvaddy villa in the south of France and leave the Tanaiste and the Minister for Finance to look after them. Better still, he argues, would be to drop off a couple of thousand children under the age of five at Dail Eireann with little messages tacked to their coats saying we would be back to collect them after we finish work today.
Who could mind them: Charlie McCreevy, Bertie Ahern, John O'Donoghue? Let us relish for a moment the prospect of a government minister starting their day in the same way as do thousands of ordinary citizens.
Alarm goes off. Stagger out of bed. Wake children. Wash children. Feed children. Wash children again. Put lunches in schoolbag or changing bag, deliver to school or nursery, attempt to put make-up on or straighten tie on way to work, spend some minutes restoring a semblance of adult gravitas, and begin your official working day. This on the assumption that no rows have broken out, that the children will wear what you want them to, and that no child suddenly remembers an undone bond-with-your-parent project involving glue, glitter and a knowledge of botany.
The Taoiseach and a number of his ministers have identified childcare as one of the biggest worries for those of us who vote. Thanks for the sympathy, gentlemen, but with the children going back to school and other care this week, it would be considerably more encouraging to have that concern translated into practical action.
Your gravitas might not be affected by finding yourself giving a presentation with a stale milk stain on your Armani shoulder pad, or full breasts starting to leak through your silk shirt just as you cut to the chase. Your pay packet certainly won't be affected by having to spend up to half your net income on childcare, but for the rest of us, this is one of the worst weeks in the year.
It's not only because the older children are returning to school - some of you may try to have your photo taken with those of our tots who are starting for the first time. It is because you have supervised the development of this economy without planning an infrastructure for the needs of us workers who are parents. This is the equivalent of asking us to fly without wings or to build digital technology before inventing the chip. A virgin birth is an easier proposition.
IT IS a long time since we shared a national consensus on the concept of virgin births, but your attitude may in part reflect the ethos of those years. From that time in the 1930s when church-state bonding matured, the State has been wholly reluctant to engage with children and their parents in any but the most distant ways. Making the care of children a matter for everyone is an issue which huge swatches of the Constitution are oriented against.
Ireland today is supposedly a pluralist, inclusive society, or at least en route to that destination. Yet the same ethos which brought down the Mother and Child Scheme of the 1950s and led to the political assassination of Dr Noel Browne, survives into this decade as a woolly-minded, cynical and wholly pragmatic rejection of the legitimate demands for a public childcare system - a parent-and-child scheme, if you like, as innovative and supportive to parents now as Dr Browne's would have been nearly 50 years ago.
Ask yourselves the consequences of your failure to address this issue. Because you have dawdled while the rest of us burn, the childcare sector is unregulated, disorganised and patently insufficient for the needs of children. There are not enough childcare places, not enough money to pay for quality childcare and not enough options to allow parents to make choices which best fit the needs of their child at changing periods in their lives.
An estimated 5,000 places have already been lost at a time when parents are being hunted by hungry employers. Most homes which shelter the one-third of children below the poverty line would fail the tests set for creches and playcentres. If you are closing them down, what are you going to do to safeguard children in inadequate housing?
Unless we find it in our hearts to leave our children with you for a day so that you can understand what it is like to plan childcare and work without back-up, workers have little choice in the matter. However, with the speed-up of global market competition, this lack may have measurable economic consequences sooner than you think. Your attitude may represent a serious risk to future investment here.
Putting people first, as Mr Ahern's election slogan claimed, is at the heart of current leadership theory in business and industry. Unregulated, unplanned and insufficient childcare-provision is a positive discouragement to international companies which as a matter of good practice now expect a childcare infrastructure for their workers and for themselves.
Childcare is needed by all parents, whether they work full or part-time in paid employment, or whether they work full-time at home. If, for example, we were to lock the Taoiseach into a room with two children under two at 8 o'clock one morning, and collect him at 7.30 p.m., odds are that he would find that work considerably more draining than the toughest inter-governmental negotiations.
Alternately, if we were to lock him in with the same two children overnight and expect him to conduct such negotiations the following day, it is probable that even the best pancake make-up would not hide the pressure he had been under - if he had been expected to do it without any official or regulated back-up.
The common excuse for the inexplicable delay in devising a parent-and-child scheme is the alleged concern that childcare policy be equitable to all kinds of parents and reflect differing parenting styles and situations.
Such policy is a wheel which has been successfully invented in many European countries, and therefore need not be reinvented here. Talk to any municipal official in the south of France if you doubt it.
The question of how best to provide equitable childcare and benefit/tax allowances is like asking how many angels can sit on the point of a needle: the point is now overcrowded, just like the creches which cannot house our children.
The more reports are commissioned, the less we seem able to give an answer. At a minimum, there is no reason why a strategic network of national and regional childcare committees cannot be established to plan and oversee childcare provision throughout the State. However, with the anti-parent-and-child ethos still lurking under this State's skin, no action is always preferable to even the smallest gesture of support.