A high voltage topic for frustrated parents

The big issues No 4 - childcare: Michelle Cassidy, owner of Sticky Fingers creche in Sallins, Co Kildare, is acutely aware of how demand for childcare has rocketed in recent years.

"There is huge demand we can't meet. We're full until August 2006," she says. "We have people coming in when they're five or six weeks pregnant, filling in application forms. They don't want to do it so early - it's like it's tempting fate - but they don't have a choice."

But finding a place is often the least of parents' worries. Sallins is prime commuter-belt territory for people working in the Dublin area.

Many parents face a crazy juggling act each day, dropping children off early in the morning, battling through traffic gridlock to make it to work and back, not to mind paying childcare costs of between €100 and €200 a week per child.

"Some parents are under an awful lot of pressure. There have been a few who have given up work because of the cost and pressure they're under to try and look after children at home."

It's a high-voltage issue on the byelection campaign trail in North Kildare and Meath.

Candidates have been quick to pick up on the frustration of parents in both constituencies which form part of the amorphous commuting population outside the capital.

Latest official figures show that in Kildare more than 40 per cent of pre-school children are being placed in childcare facilities, while 3,000 children in Meath are either receiving care in creches or from paid childminders.

The political debate surrounding childcare has hissed and fizzled around issues such as tax credits for parents and the number of childcare facilities built under the National Development Plan.

Government parties have, for example, pointed to the 54 projects either built or approved under the National Development Plan in Kildare.

Opposition parties such as Fine Gael have called for tax credits of up to €5,000 per child to help ease the burden of childcare costs.

For Fiona Healy, co-ordinator of the Meath County Childcare Committee - a State-funded body set up almost three year ago - this debate misses the bigger issues surrounding childcare.

She says that instead of throwing around statistics on numbers of places, the real issues for parents are choice and affordability of childcare

"At the moment in Meath, parents will take whatever they can get. That's not the way it should be. A parent should be able to say: 'Do I want my child to have the social interaction of a quality creche or the attention of a childminder?'," Ms Healy says.

"At the moment you have a lot of mothers going off to work with terrible guilt. They wonder whether the childcare place is any good. A lot don't want to think about that because it's best not to."

There are signs that the issue of choice, at least, is being addressed in Kildare and Meath, but not at a pace acceptable to parents or people working in the childcare area.

In Meath, for example, around 400 of the 1,000 or so new childcare places that have become available in the last 2½ years are in State-subsidised community facilities.

Costs in these settings are typically around €100 per week per child, almost half the cost of normal commercial childcare. Costs can be even less than this depending on the means of the parent.

Training courses have also resulted in 200 officially recognised childminders joining a register in the Meath area.

Apart from these positive developments, Ms Healy says talk of overall number of childcare places doesn't always reflect the reality on the ground.

She points to the mandatory provision on developers to provide 20 childcare places for every 74 dwellings.

Some builders will construct a facility which is overpriced or unsuitable as a creche, Ms Healy says, and may sell on the premises if it lies idle for long enough.

"It's very frustrating," she says. "We keep asking developers to come to talk to us about what's suitable and what's needed. Some developers are excellent and other just pay lip-service to childcare."