Madam, - It takes some doing to discuss a childcare policy without mentioning children, but you have managed it. Your Editorial on the PDs' childcare policy (April 12th) is devoid of any mention of its impact on children. So is your coverage on the same day of responses from teachers' organisations and the Department of Education.
Perhaps you are taking your lead from the childcare policy document itself, which, in its summary of findings, never mentions the effect on children at all. But I would expect any discussion of childcare policy to start with children.
Among the issues I would raise are these: If children are kept in their schools until the evening, minded by volunteers or childcare staff, their parents will not meet their teachers. Parents will not be involved in the learning process through homework, and the child will not have any one-to-one tuition. The child will not have neighbourhood friends and the parents will not be involved in their social life.
A child who is being bullied or is under stress at school, as so many are, will have no escape from the situation. Even if a child loves school, refuge from it is crucial. Would you have liked staying at school all day? Certainly there are children who would be safer and happier anywhere than at home. The State has long had a role in putting such children "into care".
But surely our social aim should be to make those unsafe, unhappy homes and the number of children in care fewer. Surely we can afford that.
Senator John Minihan, whose report has merits, has researched after-school programmes in Sweden and Quebec, but he presents these without any mention of what goes with them. In Sweden, as in several other European countries, parents of young children have a legal right to part-time work. In most European countries, parental leave is paid. If you make after-school care cheap without supporting the majority of couples who opt to have one parent at home at least part-time while their children are at school, you price that choice out of the market.
And who would run the raffle to put a roof on the school? - Yours, etc.,
VICTORIA WHITE, Ashfield Road, Ranelagh, Dublin 6.