Dermot Ahern's personal letter about child benefit dropped through various letter boxes this month. Childcare costs had already risen faster than you could say "Seven at one blow".
The children's allowance was never designed to help with childcare. But twisting benefit into an anything-goes payment was the Government's response to the fallout after Mr McCreevy's child-blind 1999 Budget. The allowance, sometimes called gut money, was originally supposed to help with basics. Now, because it is income-blind, it helps some parents with shoes, some with daycare costs and others with buying a computer game.
Four years was sufficiently lengthy to see an IT sector rise and fall. It is more than long enough to measure the impact of Irish childcare provision. None of the Government's targets has been met. Policy is so fractured, and unsympathetic to real life, the Government can't even persuade Civil Service employees to take up creche places as planned.
The Fianna Fail-PD Government had the bright idea that childcare could become a whole new industry - children measured in units, producing employment and profit. That meant targeting providers, not parents, and only those providers able to fit the definition of childcare entrepreneur.
The plan was to bring more women into the workforce without alienating those who work at home; to integrate with economic policy by creating a new industry; to milk parents' social consciences by claiming tax breaks for childcare are inequitable; and, finally, to misuse child benefit to buy off any dissidents.
The system isn't working, probably because the strategies are completely misconceived. A crisis remains in the provision and standards of daycare, especially for infants, because it largely ignored the reports it commissioned, as well as much of the advice it got.
Parents are excluded from the equation because the priority was to attract workers rather than care for children. When the results crashed into child-centred regulations designed by the health boards, casualties mounted.
The same administration believes in cutting taxes from the top down for everyone from stud-owners to rock stars, but denies parents what most other European countries recognise as a staple part of childcare strategy: a tax break. The most offensive allegation was that tax breaks would further inequality in society. Such talk, from this Government?
People with children are already disadvantaged relatively because policies on individualisation are child-blind, and don't extend to the social welfare system. If they did, parents could care for children with better support than the current stay-home allowance paid not to the carers but to their spouses.
Government policy did providers few favours either. Providers are hard pressed to reach minimum health board regulations while competing for competent staff. Profit apart, some creche fees rose by over 15 per cent a week, resulting in a net gain of only 4,100 places since last year because so many old ones were lost.
Planning requirements complicate things, because creches need space, and compliant neighbours. Capital grants for on-site creches forgot that employers opting for direct provision must be employing at least 100 people to balance the childcare books, which leaves 97 per cent of employers out of its reach.
A lobby is growing to relax health board regulations so as to make more creche places available. But the one consistent voice in this debate has been the health boards' insistence that, no matter what policies Government pursues, they will insist on the highest possible standards. The thought of compromising those standards is a nasty indication of how much slippage this contorted policy creates.
The kind of facility most likely to gain from current policy is a highly populated multi-storey creche, built next door to a long-stay industrial facility. Any parent who has studied the simplest howto book on childcare must have reservations about parking their children there. Anyway, a mobile workforce can't uproot children from one on-site work creche to the next.
The original "seven-at-one-blow" was written on the belt of a man whose political stock rose because everyone assumed the words testified to his integrity, bravery and commitment. In fact, he had only killed flies, so he didn't live happily ever after, at all.
Parents can't choose the kind of care they want for their children unless they are very well off. And because children's experience changes faster in their time than in adult time, many children are not assured of age-appropriate continuity of care. Both child and parent are under a stress they could do without.
Even if one opts, temporarily, to call a parent a "consumer", there is no logical explanation of why public policy should privilege one form of childcare while denying any assistance to such forms as the friend or neighbour who cares for children at home. The idea that a childcare sector can be developed on the same lines as other areas of manufacturing is the stuff of fairy tale. It illustrates how far from ordinary life this Government has run.
mruane@irish-times.ie