The Sligo Leitrim Roscommon Green Party will meet at 7pm Wednesday November 28th in the Glens Centre in Manorhamilton.

Participants are asked to arrive on time as room is booked for 1 hour only.

New members welcome.

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Local Green Party representatives have insisted that while measures should be taken to ensure the viability of smaller, rural community childcare facilities, the focus of community childcare funding should be concerned with lower income families, as was intended under the Equal Opportunities Childcare Programme and as is intended under the forthcoming Community Childcare Subvention Scheme.

Speaking at Friday night’s meeting in Dromahair, local Green Party representative, Johnny Gogan, outlined a proposal put forward by the Party’s Spokesperson for Health and Children, Senator Deirdre De Burca, to allocate block funding to facilities in areas of low population density, to extend the individual subvention to medical card holders and extend the implementation period of the new scheme, but stressed that prolonging a system in which disadvantaged families are subsidising the childcare costs of working families is not an option.

Mr. Gogan emphasized that until such time as resources are available to fund universal childcare provision regardless of a person’s income level, available resources should be directed where they are most needed, which was not happening under the old Equal Opportunities Childcare Programme.

Mr. Gogan said that “access to the subvention should be exclusively based on ability to pay, and working parents who can afford to pay commercial rates should not be benefitting from funding that was put in place to help lower income families.”

Mr. Gogan’s comments were echoed by Green Party PRO for Leitrim and Roscommon, Garreth McDaid.

“The new Community Childcare Subvention Scheme is not perfect. It creates difficulties for smaller, rural facilities, it limits the ability of community facilities to plan ahead, and under certain conditions, could place single parent families in poverty traps.”

“However, all of these issues can be dealth with in ways other than prolonging the Equal Opportunities Childcare Programme, which is clearly inequitable, particularly for families who are forced to use private facilities and who are not in a position to benefit from funding that working parents using community facilities are benefiting from.”

“The challenge we now face is to use the period between now and June 1st 2008, during which the staffing grant will continue to be paid, to review the financial operation of community childcare facilities, to ensure that those can afford to pay commercial rates are doing so, and that working single parents are paying no more than €125 per week, as is intended under the Community Childcare Subvention Scheme.”

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