Latest creche fiasco gives us an opportunity to finally get things right

THANK you Prime Time, for a powerful and brilliant piece of public service broadcasting.

The programme on childcare shocked us all to the core, I think. It exposed not just bad but shameful practice, and opened a lot of eyes to some of the fault lines in our continuing attitude to children.

Only a few short years ago, the Ryan Report, in its comprehensive descriptions of how institutions were run and the abuse of children facilitated, detailed what was left in the bank accounts of some of the institutions after they were closed down. What emerged was the stark fact that institutions were run at a profit – and that profit was achieved by starving children and refusing to clothe them properly. In turn, that was allowed to happen by a system of inspection that turned a blind eye to what was going on.

The parallel isn’t a fair one. It would be an entirely sweeping statement to claim that any child care setting run for profit – whether it’s owned by an individual or a multi-national — is likely to be involved in neglect or abuse. In fact, high corporate standards ought to be another guarantee of better standards of management, supervision, and care.

And I honestly don’t believe it can be argued that the only way to produce the standards of childcare that our children deserve is to replace the profit motive with a state system. I used to believe that, but what children, individually and collectively, need from childcare is love, care, fun, play, imagination, creativity, empathy and time. Building a system that can deliver those needs is a lot more complex than choosing either state or private provision.

But — and this may be a painful fact that we are just slow to accept, despite all the lessons of history — where the profit motive exists, the profit motive has to be regulated. Like many others, I kept shouting at the television during the programme the other night (and by the way, I think RTÉ has made a grievous mistake in not making it available for repeat viewing). The thing I kept shouting was “where are the managers? Where are the supervisors?”

Some of the things we saw happening on our screens would simply not be possible in a situation where a competent supervisor was involved. I’d go further than that — I don’t believe it’s possible to have a systematic and regular falsifying of records without supervisory complicity in that practice. And if there is one guarantee that neglect is going to be part of the culture, it is the ability to easily falsify records. Profit in this area comes from under-paying, under-training, and under-managing staff. And it’s clear that those three characteristics are the defining measures of far too much of our provision.

My colleague Victoria White started a column in this space the other day with four short sentences, the kind of sentences that would make any parent shudder. The sentences were: “Babies shouldn’t go to creches. Nor should toddlers. Three-year-olds shouldn’t go to creche full-time. It’s as simple as that.”

Now, if you analyse those sentences, phrase by phrase, you can perhaps make a case one way or the other. Taken together, they amount to a pretty sweeping condemnation of childcare. And I fundamentally disagree with that. Good childcare is good for children. Parents want to make choices that are in the best interests of their children, and the availability of good childcare is a key ingredient in helping them to make those choices.

Absolutely the worst way to approach the issues raised by last week’s Primetime programme is to decide that children everywhere have to be taken out of crèches, and mothers everywhere have to return to the home. Instead, we should be glad of one thing, At last, the issue of childcare — how we go about it, what we should be prepared to pay for it, how we regulate it, what we define as quality — has become a mainstream issue for debate.

Of course it’s not the first time the issue has been raised. This newspaper has led the way in exposing scandals in the whole area of childcare in the past. I’ve written about it many times, here and elsewhere. Now and again in the past, if I wrote a column warning about the haphazard and cack-handed way we have developed our childcare system, I might get a phone call or two from a specialist journalist or from someone in the field. Last week, in the aftermath of the programme, I was getting phone calls from political journalists. That’s one measure of the fact that this has now become a mainstream issue.

The bottom line here is that we didn’t have a childcare system of any sort in Ireland a couple of decades ago. Then we suddenly decided we had to get every woman in Ireland into the workforce and we even changed the tax system to “encourage” women to work. An industry grew up overnight, supported by massive fees and latterly by massive state subsidies.

In other words, we grew a childcare sector from the outside in — led totally by the needs of the economy. In every jurisdiction that can be proud of its childcare, the system was grown from the inside out, led totally by the needs and rights of its children and parents.

Here’s one small, forgotten example of how it worked. In 2002 the then government established a tiny agency called the CECDE, the Centre for Early Childhood Development and Education. It was a group of six or seven people, whose job was to show us how to do it right. And they did fantastic work with tiny resources, developing curricula and quality standards to help the development of the early childhood sector to develop on the best possible lines.

In 2008, a month after the collapse of the property bubble, the CECDE was labelled a quango by the same government that set it up, and closed down, more or less overnight. Along with Combat Poverty, it was the first such body to be axed. We’re broke now, was the message. No more of that old quality rubbish.

Have we learned? Can we learn? Do we want the Primetime of 10 or 15 years time to be exposing further scandals in our childcare system? If we don’t, we have to start afresh. Good childcare, I’ll say it again, is good for children. But good childcare focuses on their needs, no one else’s. And we can’t have it if we’re not prepared to pay for it. That’s the bad news. The good news is that it’s the best possible investment we can make. There is nothing to be lost in setting about developing a well-managed, well-trained system of childcare, recruiting only people who want to work with children and enabling them to make a decent living from their work.

So we shouldn’t be seeing this as a crisis, but rather as an opportunity. An opportunity, for once in a way, to do things right. I can promise you this — if we get our system of childcare right, and we know how to do it, providing investment is possible — we will never regret it.