L’operaio dell’asilo nido che ha “ribaltato e costretto” il bambino a terra in seguito ad un’aggressione “grave” viene incarcerato

Its a might unusual for a man to be employed in childcare.

It is disgraceful that the Government have allowed the fucking appalling market failure in childcare to persist for so long now. It benefits almost nobody. Parents end up reducing working hours when they can’t get affordable childcare, reducing their income along with tax take and productivity. Parents worry about the standard of care their children receive. Workers are paid abysmal wages (although by Unionising recently those have improved somewhat). Most providers make fuck all money despite the high fees and subsidies.

It benefits only a small number of large providers who make good profits. Giraffe is one of those.

>In 2019, [Giraffe] paid €6.5 million in dividends to their owners. … in 2020 … nearly €1.7 million was paid [and] the company received €6.7 million in public subsidies through the Temporary Wage Subsidy Scheme. In effect, the subsidy helped pay the dividend

https://www.thephoenix.ie/article/polemic-on-childcare-providers-strike-michael-taft/

An expose by RTÉ investigates a number of years ago on creches which included Giraffe led to Tusla being given a statutory role in overseeing early childcare facilities

The private sector will never be capable of providing affordable and high quality childcare.

Provision of childcare is seldom profitable except at huge scale and arguably to the detriment of the children who use the service.

Most providers operate on a break-even basis. Again there isn’t some easy overhead that can be slashed, by far their greatest cost is staffing.

And that is in an environment in which fees are absurd, staff pay is low, and thus supply is low.

The way to do it is to build facilities, however run, which are colocated with primary schools to provide the necessary scale with staff who are paid out of public funds and with a cost that is low for parents. That will cost money, lots of it, both in capital and current expenditure. It will put most of the current providers out of business and they will have to either become employees or find something else to do.

That’s the trade off. Some small business people lose. Taxpayers who don’t want their taxes funding childcare for others lose. It is still a good idea because there is a huge benefit to children in having good early childhood care and education, a massive benefit to the economy in allowing parents who would otherwise choose not work to choose to work, and it is more economically efficient than the current system where the market has failed.

Government have committed to reducing fees to €200 a month. We are almost a year on from the election and no plan has been published. This is not going to happen unless a huge effort by the machinery of the State starts very soon.

They also need to get real about the trade offs and stop trying to pretend that this can happen without anyone losing out.