In Fingal, community crèches are few and far between – and falling

Mwanaidi Mohamed steps into a large cold room inside Balbriggan’s Cairde community centre on Hampton Street.

“This room’s for Balbriggan women’s group,” said Mohamed, holding the door.

In one corner of the room, there is a pile of folding chairs next to a rolled-up yoga mat. On the wall, sewing instructions are scrawled on a piece of paper.

Near the door, Queen Agbonyinma is stooped over a sewing machine. She is making a scarf to go with a dress she’s already seamed for Christmas, she said.

Balbriggan Women’s Development Group holds all kinds of classes in this room. Even cooking.

But not all the mums can join in whenever they want because they might not have someone to mind their kids, say Mohamed and Agbonyinma.

“Majority of the women I talk to it’s a huge wait for them to get in, and expensive,” said Mohamed.

Their own kids are a little bit older now. But they have both grappled with getting childcare for them, too.

Mohamed said she had to wait three months for a spot to open up for her daughter in a private crèche. She was stressed out about missing classes in college at the time, she says. Her husband had to be at work.

Fingal consistently ranks near the bottom of the table, when comparing ratios of the more affordable community crèches to costlier private ones in different council areas.

There were 19 community crèches in Fingal in 2020-2021, figures show. Now there are 18, suggests the most recent data compiled by Pobal, a social-inclusion and community-development non-profit.

And there’s still only one not-for-profit childcare facility in Balbriggan.

The bulk of policy and funding for childcare comes down from the Department of Children. But councillors say Fingal County Council could play more of a role too – in offering affordable premises, and zoning suitable locations, and evaluating the need for spaces when planners look over planning applications.

Its Development Plan for 2023 to 2029 lists doing more of that as an objective, including a commitment to “promote the establishment of community-based, non-profit, childcare in future Fingal community facilities”.

A spokesperson for the council said it plans to review its role in providing not-for-profit childcare facilities sometime this year. But, when exactly is “yet to be set”, they said.

The need

A 2021 report by Fingal’s Children and Young People’s Services Committee (CYPSC) notes that both Balbriggan and Blanchardstown have higher socio-economic deprivation, like elevated unemployment rates, than other places in Fingal.

They also have above-average concentrations of single parent, and migrant and Traveller families.

Community creches provide vital services for children living at risk of poverty and social exclusion, the report says.

There’s just one community crèche in Balbriggan, which opened in 2009, and offers both full-time and part-time care plus after-school services, says the CYPSC’s 2021 report, “Double Disadvantage”.

“There is a dearth of purpose-built, accessible childcare facilities across the county,” says the 2021 report.

This is especially true about community not-for-profit childcare spaces, it says.

It recommends that the CYPSC work with the council and the Department of Education to support the development of more.

Agbonyinma, the woman who was sewing a scarf at the Cairde community centre, is mum to three young boys. “It’s not easy,” she said.

At one point during the pandemic, she had a hospital appointment but no one to watch one of her kids, she says.

Like Mohamed, Agbonyinma is also a migrant mum with no parents close by to help with childcare. To get to the hospital, she had to turn elsewhere.

“So there is a lady that has an African shop in the city centre on Moore Street,” said Agbonyinma.

She had befriended her when she used to live in the city, she says. The woman agreed to babysit her kid at her shop that day.

Agbonyinma says private childcare places are still expensive for her. “And sometimes they don’t want them all the time, they want them two days in a week, three days in a week.”

Building them

Tom O’Leary, a Fine Gael councillor for Balbriggan, says there should be a mechanism under which the council has to build a crèche for every new housing estate.

That would be handed over to a community or private operator once it’s ready, he says. “Say the community crèche, give them a five-year lease.”

If they can get up and running and stay in business, the council can renew their lease for another five years, said O’Leary. “There’s sites all over the country, all over Fingal, all over Balbriggan.”

There are planning guidelines and design standards for apartments –  set by national government – that dictate how many childcare spaces should be provided when new developments are built.

On the edge of Balbriggan, the Land Development Agency (LDA) has plans to develop more than 800 homes at Castlelands, and facilities including a crèche with about 150 spaces.

A spokesperson for the LDA said it hadn’t made any decision about who will operate the creche yet. So, it’s unclear if it will be a private or community not-for-profit childcare facility.

The LDA’s current focus is putting in the infrastructure on the site so it can move ahead with delivering the scheme and homes, the spokesperson said.

The LDA’s community audit, which was part of its planning application, shows the working behind its estimate of childcare need. The assessment doesn’t mention the affordability issue, whether it will be a community creche, or how community incomes or a lack of family back-up may affect the need.

Karen Power, a Green Party councillor for Balbriggan, says the council has a lot of power to turn things around by finding spaces suitable to become community childcare places.

When the council was drawing up a new development plan in 2022, she worked with fellow party member Daniel Whooley, the council’s former deputy mayor, on motions to push that along, she says.

Whooley says the council needs to beef up resources in its planning department to process planning applications for building childcare places.

“We don’t have enough planners, we don’t have enough people in public service to process these applications,” says Whooley.

Power says the cost of insurance is another big barrier that needs to be tackled for more places to open. Choosing buildings carefully and wisely is one way to avoid steep insurance costs, she says.

“It’s about providing infrastructure that can be used by as many community organisations as possible,” Power said. “But that’s also tailored for providing childcare setting.”

Other solutions

Mohamed, one of the mums in Balbriggan, said the government should work to grow the number of independent childminders. “That would also make it a little bit easier,” she says.

She’d lived in the United Kingdom before moving here, she says, and saw how childminders there were bridging big gaps.

Through National Action Plan for Childminding 2021-2028, the government plans to financially back independent childminders to engage in quality training programmes and meet the necessary conditions for getting registered with Tusla.

That way, they can be part of the NCS and offer subsidised childcare.

Tony Murphy, an independent councillor for Balbriggan, says paying decent wages to crèche workers should also be prioritised if the government is serious about offering childcare to more people.

“These are professional people who have degrees in child psychology, diplomas in Montessori teaching,” he said.

The average hourly wage of people who worked with children between 2020 to 2021 – bar those on employment schemes – was €12.60, according to the last early years sector annual report published in May 2022.

An employment regulation order in September 2022 lifted the minimum hourly pay in the sector to between €13 and €17.25 an hour for different childcare workers.

Better now?

While the NCS subsidy has increased, the “Double Disadvantage” report mentions ways the scheme might let down disadvantaged families.

Low-income families who had qualified for full-time childcare subsidies under an old scheme – the Community Childcare Subvention (CCS) – can’t get that anymore under the NCS, it says.

“Children from families experiencing unemployment are entitled to a maximum of 20 hours of universal provision per week,” it says.

But, a spokesperson for the Department of Children said the NCS erased some of the barriers to qualifying for subsidised childcare that existed under older schemes.

Like how it was “linked to Social Protection payments or a Medical Card in order to receive supports”, they said.

There were no special arrangements for families experiencing long-term unemployment in the old scheme, they said.

And “those who are on low incomes on the NCS benefit from the highest levels of subsidies”, the spokesperson said.

Another potential cause for disparity in the NCS is its sponsored referral system, the report says. That means being referred for childcare support by specific state bodies based on child welfare, child protection, or other qualifying grounds.

But not every family has equal access to staff at these government bodies, it says.

A spokesperson for the Department of Children said it is drawing up a new strand of funding for the NCS to further improve how it responds to socio-economic disadvantages.

It’s called “Tackling Disadvantage: The Equal Participation Model (EPM)”, they said, and once up and running, it would offer a mix of universal and targeted support for disadvantaged families who need childcare.

Mohamed, one of the mums in Balbriggan, says people’s entitlements are not always communicated well.

She had to tell her neighbour that she’d qualify for subsidised childcare. “And she’s Irish.”

Agbonyinma, the woman sewing in Balbriggan, says her mental health would definitely improve if she could get more hours of subsidised childcare and a bit of a breather from the kids.

“It’s like your life is centred around them,” she said.

Mohamed nods.