Ireland crippled by high childcare costs – Government must use Budget 2023 to break cycle of poverty
IRELAND has some of the highest childcare fees in Europe.
However, a new funding model announced this week will bring a “transformative change” to the childcare sector, Roderic O’Gorman has claimed.
The Minister for Children said Together for Better is the “first step towards significant further developments in the sector which will be introduced in the coming years”.
The announcement came as the Children’s Rights Alliance hosted Ireland’s first End Child Poverty Week.
The week-long series of events focuses on five thematic areas of child poverty, the root causes and the best practice solutions needed to break the cycle of poverty for children and young people.
Writing in The Irish Sun, Chief Executive Tanya Ward, says that ensuring access to quality and affordable childcare and early childhood education is one key way of breaking the cycle of poverty.
READ MORE IN CHILDCARE CRISIS
END Child Poverty Week aims to put a spotlight on the impact of child poverty on children, young people and families across a number of different issues – housing, food poverty, play and education.
We hope the week is an important reminder for decision-makers, ahead of Budget 2023, to put children and families first.
End Child Poverty Week is one week in the context of an incredibly difficult time for families across the country.
We hear from our members of the crippling effect rising prices have on their day to day life and we are very concerned about the lasting impact this can have on children and young people.
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We know many parents are doing without in order to provide food for their children at dinner time, or to scrape together enough to ensure their child can join the school trip or head to football training.
To get a sense of what it means to be living in serious deprivation or disadvantage, this is what we need to focus on.
It means children may not get a hot meal that day, they might miss out on opportunities to socialise with their peers. More and more families are being pulled into poverty the longer we see rising costs.
We are facing a hard winter and the Government has hard decisions to make with Budget 2023 – but investing in children is not a difficult one to make.
BREAK THE CYCLE
Investing in early years is the single most effective way we can break the cycle of poverty that is trapping thousands of children in Ireland today.
Access to affordable and quality childcare can be an equaliser for children – providing all with an equal start to reach their full potential and it also lifts an enormous pressure of families.
Ireland has some of the highest childcare costs in Europe. This needs to be addressed if we are serious about ending child poverty.
Poverty is not inevitable. I have said this time and time again. The rates of poverty we see are a result of political choices.
So, Government can choose to do something about it now.
Interim measures to address the cost of living will help in the short-term but the cost of poverty requires long-term planning and long-term vision.
The most recent Government survey showed almost 9 per cent of the population in 2021 were living in food poverty – that is almost half a million people.
TIME FOR CHANGE
If half a million people are struggling to get the very basic of food, we need radical change.
The hot school meals programme is a gamechanger for children.
The feedback from the schools running the programme note better engagement in the classroom as well as happier children overall.
It has a hugely positive impact on the school community and the teachers however, it is not available in every school.
The recent investments made by Government have been welcome as they have brought the programme to more DEIS schools, reaching children experience higher levels of disadvantage. But poverty is present outside of DEIS schools.
We need to see the expansion of this programme nationally.
The Children’s Rights Alliance is also calling for the programme to be expanded to cover holiday times.
When schools closed over the summer, that security and certainty of a meal was pulled away from the families who rely on the school to provide it.
Looking ahead to mid-term breaks and to Christmas holidays, this worry only increases for families.
No child should have to go to school or bed hungry. No parent should be kept up at night worried about how they will manage the next meal for the children.
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The groundwork is already being done by Government in this space, and it is working to address child poverty levels.
But to end child poverty, we need to be more ambitious in our thinking and more determined with budget investments.