Budget 2022 negotiations are ongoing.
The State will reportedly double childcare investment by 2028.
According to Minister for Children Roderic O’Gorman, the government plans to double its investment in the next 7 years.
He told Newstalk, “We already put €638 million into childcare each year. But compared to other European countries, that is quite a small amount… The Government commitment is that by 2028 we’ll have doubled the state investment in childcare and that will bring us to well over a billion euros.”
He added, “What we’re looking at is to take away this marketisation of childcare where, over a number of years, we were seeing this continuous increase in the annual fees that parents were paying.”
“So what we’re doing is making sure that any additional funding that we put into the sector is very much linked to a set of conditions in terms of fees and the pay that childcare professionals receive.”
Minister O’ Gorman added that a decrease in childcare costs has yet to be decided for Budget 2022.
However, he said discussions about the “issues of affordability and the constant increase in fees” are ongoing.
According to the Department of Children and Youth Affairs, the average cost of childcare in Ireland was €184 per week for full-time care and €109.98 for part-time in 2020.
In a recent investigation by HerFamily, we discovered that childcare fees have increased in many facilities since these figures were released. It’s now not uncommon for parents to pay €1,300 per child, per month, for full-time childcare in Dublin.
