Joyce Fegan: School's out for summer, AKA return of the juggle struggle

The calls for help began in early June. They cropped up in WhatsApp groups, in idle chat with neighbours and while queuing for coffee.

The help was needed, at latest, by the end of June.

The help needed to last the duration of the summer.

“Minder needed for three-year-old and seven-year-old from 8am to 5pm five days a week for July and August.”

“Does anyone have a teenage daughter who could mind eight-year-old twin boys for the summer?”

“Are there any camps for four-year-olds?”

As approximately half a million children finish up in primary school this week, and some of the five thousand preschools close their doors for summer, I hope the parents got the help they needed. I’m sure their employers and the exchequer would be hopeful too.

If Covid shone a solar-sized light on the absolutely fundamental infrastructure that childcare is to our economy and society, and if we then went back to relying on our patchy and cost-prohibitive care system, then the return of the summer-induced care gap is a timely reminder of that patchwork, pricey system. And maybe a nudge to do something about it.

Why?

For many years, organisations such as the National Women’s Council of Ireland and experts including Professor Ursula Barry have been calling for a publicly-funded childcare system in Ireland. 

It is not novel, it is not a reinvention of the wheel — publicly-funded childcare standard in many European countries. 

It is a model that sees parents being able to access affordable and well-regulated care. 

It is a model that sees childcare workers receive above-poverty-line pay, and not have to sign on come June.

In Ireland right now, our childcare system looks something like this: grandparents, expensive creches, booked-up preschools, small set-ups in people’s homes, parents juggling paid work and unpaid work, one parent leaving the workforce altogether, and bits of parental leave added on here with some afterschool care over there. It’s a smorgasbord of a system.

And at the centre of it are small, impressionable and precious humans who will greatly benefit from the quality of early care they get, especially those who do not have the privilege of standing on a level playing field.

University College Dublin’s Prof Barry talks about “placing the care economy at the centre of Irish society”. Because let’s face it, care is the invisible centre of our society and economy, from a day-to-day point of view and from a very long-term point of view too.

Workers are, as the lockdowns highlighted, greatly prohibited from being economically productive if they cannot source care for those whose lives are dependent on them. 

No care, no work. No workers, no economy. 

Care is crucial. But mostly unpaid, in the form of a stay-at-home parent, or low-paid in the case of childcare workers, nannies, and minders.

Long-term then, if everyone stopped reproducing because the consequences of it were just too expensive, then where would our future taxpayers come from?

“Behind every office or mine there is the hidden work of millions of women who have consumed their life, their labour, producing the labour power that works in those factories, schools, offices, and mines,” says Italian-American scholar Silvia Federici.

In a newly published book, Essential Labour, which is very much informed by the care chasm that Covid caused and exposed, Angela Garbes spells out in black and white the absolutely fundamental, and invaluable, nature of care work.

“Placing reproductive labour outside the capitalist sphere is what upholds the entire system,” writes Garbes.

“If those who do ‘professional’ work had to commensurately pay the care workers who made their work possible, there would be less profit to be made. Without us, the system falls apart.”

We’ve experienced that.

Which brings us back to Ireland.

Right now, the State helps out with childcare in two ways: through ECCE (the Early Childhood Care and Education) and the National Childcare Scheme (NCS).

ECCE gives you 15 free hours of care a week, three hours a day across five days — most people don’t live beside preschools, so you can factor the commute to and from into those three hours.

And it kicks in from the September of the year the child will turn three. January, it turns out, is not a great time to have a baby, if you need childcare support in Ireland.

The National Childcare Scheme kicks in from when the child is six months, but its contribution to the cost of care is nominal next to the price of creches. 

Bringing the two schemes together — it means the State is sending all this money into the hands of private childcare providers, as opposed to, say, funnelling it into that publicly-funded model of childcare.

Imagine if we got to reinvest just some of that money into the State and into a State service, all in the service of our most impressionable citizens — our children.

Earlier this month, children’s minister Roderic O’Gorman told this newspaper that he was finalising proposals to significantly reduce creche fees and to increase pay rates for those working in the sector.

“Our aim in this year’s budget is to substantially cut the cost of childcare for all parents,” Mr O’Gorman said.

But in cutting costs, are we really boxing clever?

Will a move be made to a public model of care, as is standard in many of our neighbouring countries, one that will provide sustainability in the system and security for workers?

Will a move be made to recognise the invaluable work of childcare, and the economy of workers it upholds?

Will those who provide care work, be it in the home or outside of it, have their contribution to the economy recognised and remunerated?

If it’s cost you’re thinking about, “how could we ever move towards such a model?”, turn the clock back to 1970, to when women in Ireland on average earned 55% of the hourly rate of men. Change was activated. It didn’t bankrupt the nation; the opposite, in fact.

Budget 2023 will be announced this October. Right now, Government departments and ministers are drawing up what that will look like.

Right now, many parents and carers are the experts in what balancing paid work and care work looks and feels like, how it impacts their family’s balance sheet and, most importantly, the quality of their life and the wellbeing of their children.

This summer, as you are reminded of what a care gap feels like in your life, perhaps we can use the experience to ask the people we have elected to run our State, to build systems that serve our lives and reflect our society. An email to your local TD might go a long way.