Children are now everybody’s business

THERE was some fine architecture on display in the Prime Time ‘Breach of Trust’ programme last Tuesday.

The crèche buildings, in which children were mistreated, were well-appointed.

All looked to have been constructed to a high specification. Inside, the rooms were airy and painted in bright colours, to appeal to children. The fixtures and fittings looked to be of top quality.

If the architecture of the crèches was being investigated, there would have been no outrage, no disbelief.

Instead, the architecture of the system of childcare was on trial. And that has turned out to be depressing.

The individuals who mistreated the children are responsible for their actions, and should have to answer for them.

Similarly, the managers and owners failed the children, and their parents, through lax employment and supervision standards.

But, beyond that, questions must be asked as to how childcare took on all the aspects of a business, at the cost of what it once was — a caring profession.

Once the signal went out that there was a buck to be turned in childcare, it was no longer the preserve of those with a special interest in caring for other people’s children.

A good business person is interested in costs, and selling the product. Keeping costs down is the way to success. If the product is, say, widgets, then the customer can check out the quality and price, and take it or leave it on that basis.

With childcare, the quality is more indefinable, processed behind closed doors, and may not become apparent for years after the child has moved on.

It’s difficult to see how the business model could be properly applied to childcare.

That, however, was a choice made back in the champagne years, when the property bubble was being blown good-o. A requirement arose for a serious level of childcare. Couples were responding to opportunities to make serious bucks, or, in far more cases, both were working to keep up with big mortgages and acquired living standards.

The Government could have put childcare largely in the care of the State by developing a public system, chasing the example of Scandinavian countries, which take childcare seriously.

This would, most likely, have required higher taxes. Who would have welcomed that? At a time when cutting taxes was the first article of faith in the body politic, what party would have campaigned on the slogan ‘more taxes for childcare’. If the Government had done so, the opposition would have made serious hay.

Would the public have responded positively to such a move? Hardly.

Developing a public system would have laid ultimate responsibility with the Government, and, back in the day, a guiding principle of government was to sub-contract out as much as possible in order to bulk-up the layers between frontline problems and the door of the Cabinet.

In the short-term, there could only be hassle and grief in developing a public childcare system, so it was best to pass it onto entrepreneurs to let rip.

The strategy was twofold. Provide hundreds of millions of euro in subsidies to developers to build facilities, and throw money at parents to sort themselves out.

Specifically, an annual payment of €1,000 for every child under six was awarded, to complement burgeoning child benefit, which increased four-fold between 2000 and 2008.

In the latter year, a family with three children aged under six received €166 monthly in child benefit for each of their first two children, and €203 for the third, in addition to €3,000 for the early childhood supplement.

This was a total of €9,420 in child-related subsidies over the course of a year.

What if the Government diverted some of that cash towards a State-run childcare system?

How would parents have reacted? That’s apart, at all, from the political fall-out from parents who worked in the home. No government was going to be bothered with such issues at the height of the champagne years.

Much better to throw cash around, and to blazes with any long-term vision.

Staffing these bright, new, shining buildings was the next move.

It was noticeable, in the Prime Time programme, that nearly all the staff were young. It doesn’t take a genius to know that a demographic mix in a crèche, blending hard-won experience with alleged, youthful enthusiasm, would be a good model, but some models aren’t best suited to the imperatives of business.

These workers had to have a qualification appropriate to a business. Entry to training was based on academic achievement.

Some people who entered childcare in the past decade did so not for any great wish to work with children, but because the training requirements matched their own academic results. And, in turn, those workers are largely poorly-paid, with little incentive to do a job above and beyond the basics. What was once regarded as a caring profession is now, for many, regarded as a career, often replete with frustration.

For sure, there is still a large cohort within childcare that has a sense of vocation, but that is no longer regarded as a prerequisite.

Once the business model had been followed, it was inevitable that lip-service had to be paid to regulation.

And what a joke that was.

Last Thursday, Claire O’Sullivan reported, on the front page of the Irish Examiner, on crèche-inspection reports that were published in this newspaper as far back as 2006. Headlines like ‘Every Parent’s Nightmare’ and ‘Shocking and Deplorable’ characterised the verdicts on how the crèches were run.

Politicians, and the public, expressed dismay and, after a while, it blew over. Only when confronted through the medium of TV is the country willing to wake up to reality?

Where to now?

Inspections will be stepped up. Standards may improve. There will, most likely, be some who no longer see it as worth their while to turn a buck in childcare.

But none of that will deliver the kind of model required by a modern, European country that wishes to value the rearing of children.

That requires money, and, unfortunately, now is the worst time to be looking for money.

Most of all, what’s needed is an examination of the values in society, and how those values were skewed during the times of fake wealth. If that can be acknowledged, then, at least, we have arrived at a starting point for providing care for children that matches the rhetoric so often employed about the subject.