€20,580 a year on childcare sums up what's wrong with this country

The scale of the vice around the squeezed middle has been laid bare

Some parents are paying over €20,000 a year for childcare.

EVERY now and then, amid all of the bluff and bluster, Irish radio phone-ins can crystallise public mood.

Nowhere was this more evident this week than when a woman named Frankie called the RTÉ Today post-budget phone show. The long-running tradition gives the public a chance to ask questions about what was and wasn’t included in the previous day’s budget.

While Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe and Public Expenditure Minister Michael McGrath pitched the budget as a helping hand for working people, the scale of the vice around the squeezed middle was laid bare by Frankie in one figure: €20,580.

That, the price of a decent new car but not half the cost of a James Bond-themed 50th birthday, was what Frankie and her partner pay in childcare costs every year for her two children. 

This includes a 10% discount because they go to the same creche, a national subsidy, and Early Childhood Care and Education hours. She has, she told the ministers, been forced to contemplate either cutting her hours or leaving the workforce entirely.

Mr McGrath was empathetic, calling it “an enormous amount of money” and extolled the virtues of the Government’s plan for childcare as outlined on Tuesday, which expands the universal national
childcare scheme subsidy to all children under the age of 15.

Michael McGrath extolled the virtues of the Government’s plan for childcare.

The subsidy provides 50c per hour towards the cost of a registered childcare place for a maximum of 45 hours per week. 

In a bid to attract and retain childcare staff, a new funding stream will support creches and other providers, a €69m package is aimed at employing degree-qualified staff, establishing career structures, and improving services without increasing fees for parents.

This funding was being given, said Mr McGrath, in an understanding with providers that fees will not increase.

While putting €200m a year into the sector to support recruitment and retention of staff is both logical and morally right, the minister accepted that it will not “put a big dent” in what Frankie is paying.

Meanwhile, a bill put forward in the last Dáil by now junior children’s minister Anne Rabbitte, which would have exempted creches from commercial rates, has lapsed with the changing of governments. 

If this bill had been made law, it would have meant Frankie’s creche not paying the €40,000 in rates it was liable for last year and could pass that saving on to parents.

These are systemic flaws of a system built with no planning. When Charlie McCreevy individualised taxes in the budget of 2000, it was to fill yawning gaps in the burgeoning Celtic Tiger workforce, but there was no idea of what these people, mostly women, who were being “encouraged” to join the workforce would do with their children. 

The single-income family, which most people over a certain age grew up in, was killed off with not a single thought given to how to balance the workforce with the family. That lack of thinking has persisted for two decades and now we’re at the point where a single-income family purchasing a home is a pipe dream for most.

For those who will race to find their contrarian reflex — and this should not need to be said in 2021 — the economy needs workers and it needs children. Our pension requirements will be in major difficulty by 2040 and €21bn in the red by 2070. Not having a current or future source of social insurance funding would be a disaster.

Besides, which, nobody is asking for it to be easy.

Frankie did not call Claire Byrne on Wednesday asking for a free ride, for a live-in nanny providing
24-hour care to be supplied and paid for by the State. She simply asked that she and her family have a little money at the end of the month.

There is a scene in the first episode of the fourth season of the US political drama The West Wing. 

Three of the president’s staff become stranded in Middle America. Outside their DC bubble, they remain disconnected from their “real American” counterparts. 

That is until they meet a man in a hotel bar who is trying to put his daughter through college, who tells them: “I never imagined, at $55,000 a year, I’d have trouble making ends meet. And my wife brings in another 25 . It should be hard. I like that it’s hard. Putting your daughter through college, that’s, that’s a man’s job. A man’s accomplishment. But it should be a little easier. Just a little easier. Cause in that difference is … everything.”

Nobody in Ireland wants it to be easy. There is no worker who doesn’t accept that there are limitations to what a government can do, but a hand here or there — or at least the foundation of systems that don’t work against you — isn’t a lot to ask.

Ireland is now awash with workers and working families who followed what they were told was the path to a comfortable life — work hard, go to college, get a job — who are on good wages but are struggling. They are struggling within systems that are poorly built or not planned at all, and they are struggling because when you run up against these systems, you have to fight to be heard.

Like the family of Adam Terry, whose scoliosis surgeries have been delayed, leading him to feel like he is “bottom of the barrel”. His case, the Taoiseach told the Dáil, is a systemic failure, not a question of resources. But is that not worse?

If we didn’t have it and couldn’t achieve better, that is one argument. But to be capable of better and it not happen? To leave Adam writhing in agony or a six-year-old named Rosie with dislocated hips because their surgeries aren’t carried out? That is unconscionable.

The Taoiseach says this system has failed. Mr McGrath recognises that the childcare system is struggling because of years of underfunding. The less said about our health and housing systems the better. Major capital projects are dying on the vine, the “temporary” direct provision system remains a stain on all of us.

Ireland is a good place to live by any international standard. But it could be better with just a little
initiative or imagination.

However, when the response by the chief executive of the largest local authority in the country to a legitimate question from students about a student accommodation crisis is a sarcastic suggestion to become property developers, is that something you’d expect to see?