From next June, every child in Ireland will be able to buy a carton of juice each day. Under the enhanced child benefit payments, just over 90p per day will be paid to primary carers, usually mothers, for their child's welfare. It doesn't sound much, but the increase is historic. Irish children were among the least well-supported in Europe, and Wednesday's Budget is determined to start changing that picture.
But bad fairies hovered over Charlie McCreevy's supposedly novel plans. The ghosts of Fianna Fail's election manifesto promises to working parents fluttered somewhere offstage; spectres of parents paying £130 a week for childcare from take-home pay; yearnings of young couples wanting children, who know they'll need a savings plan to afford one.
The thrust of childcare policy now rests on a muddled use of the oldest benefit system of all. Little was put in place to recognise the needs of parents, whether in the home or out at work.
The mechanism of child benefit, designed originally as an anti-poverty measure specially targeted towards Ireland's old-style large families, is now used to conflate a series of separate policy areas. Poverty, child support, childcare and employment initiatives must draw from this inevitably narrow well. Millionaires will benefit in equal measure with people on the poverty line. Out-at-work parents want the Government to honour its election manifesto commitment to give them tax relief. Alternately, a direct parent payment could achieve the same end. Parents working in the home legitimately complain of being disadvantaged because of the impact of limited individualisation. If Mr McCreevy had begun to individualise the social welfare system, some of that imbalance would be realigned. He didn't, and it isn't.
The picture of society emerging through the tax system is one where the person as parent is not recognised at all. For practical purposes, taxpayers are barren, and are better off if they don't have children. A typical two-income family will get an extra £60 on average in their take-home pay. But with children and childcare costs, that increase means nothing. The same system fails the single-income family because there is no children's tax allowance, as there used to be.
The end recipient of a tax allowance or parent payment spent on childcare costs would be childcare providers, who already are pressing for revenue funding towards the cost of employing and keeping expert staff. It is only a matter of time before the Government will have to address the problem of staff shortages and low pay in childcare.
Child benefit is not a useful mechanism to do so unless it is elevated into a parent payment, made age-specific and income-specific, and supported by new anti-poverty measures. The potential for muddle is clear. Were childcare and child support managed by a single Minister, a strategic management initiative could fairly quickly draw together the different needs and challenges in the childcare, support and provision areas.
The Government claims it wants to give parents choices. This rhetoric is entirely empty. Who has a real choice, other than the rich? If you want to stay home with your young children, you might as well buy Lotto tickets as rely on this Budget. If your children are getting older and you want to go back to work or education, there is still no way you will afford childcare. Meanwhile, the real value of work done by parents in the home remains ignored. John Major introduced household satellite accounts to measure unpaid work. Irish administrators have not followed that example. Thus, although many fine words are spoken about the importance of parents caring for their own children, no one has backed that up in terms which raise the status and the profile of parents in the home.
Although the Government is leading by example in setting up a network of civil service creches, it must face the fact that many parents do not want to leave their children in a creche, and that some 80 per cent prefer to place their child in smaller, domestic settings. A similar mechanism to the new rent-a-room scheme can be developed to encourage registration of informal childcare providers who work in their home or in the parents' home.
Parents will support a layered system of policies and strategies that is less complicated than the grants and benefits schemes already operating in other areas. It is in the Government's interest to assume parents will be divided on the best way to move forward. As a matter of urgency, special funding and labour measures need to be put in place for parents of children under five.
The combination of conflation and confusion about childcare means parents, employers and providers will be running around in circles for some time to come. Why can't the Government devise a flexible system of parent and child support that enables people to move in and out of the workforce, without penalty, depending on the needs of their child?
mruane@irish-times.ie