Kitty Holland: Childcare closures lay Ireland’s insidious sexism bare

A company went into liquidation in the past fortnight, resulting in the loss of more than 50 jobs and meaning that many of the 400 or so people reliant on it could not themselves get to work. There has been some coverage of this crisis but little reaction from political leaders. Not a peep from Government, other than a few words from the Tánaiste when she happened to be canvassing in the neighbourhood.

The jobs were at five childcare centres in west Co Clare. Although reports have referred to the “up to 400 families” left suddenly without childcare in Kilrush, Kilkee, Lissycasey, Kilmihil and Kildysart, interviews with those affected have all been with women.

The company that ran the centres, the West Clare Early Years Care and Education Services, provided mainly State-funded and subsidised childcare. As well as the Early Childhood Care and Education scheme (the free preschool all children are entitled to), the centres provided the Community Childcare Subvention (highly subsidised childcare for disadvantaged families) and the Community Training and Employment programmes (subsidised childcare to parents participating in “eligible” training or back-to-work schemes).

The company, which opened in 2000, went into sudden liquidation following a board meeting on February 13th. The decision was relayed to its workforce by text. Its main funders, the Department of Children and Pobal, were both unaware that the rug was about to be pulled.

It is now apparent the problems went back to 2014, when the department was told of apparent “financial irregularities”. Pobal, which was asked by the department to investigate, issued a report in November citing “significant governance issues and an amount of overclaimed childcare funding totalling approximately €500,000”.

Although the report was referred to the Garda Bureau of Fraud Investigation and the Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement, it was the understanding of the department and Pobal that they were all working with the company to maintain services. An “action plan” was to be drawn up, to be ready next month, in order “to secure the future of the company”.

The department and Pobal, we are told, were “informed through the local media late on Saturday evening” of the decisions to close.

The department has not said how much state money has gone into the company over its 15 years, and company accounts were not filed last year. The most recent, covering 2013, show it took in €799,165 in state grants in 2012 and €827,974 in 2013. The largest sums came via Pobal to run the Community Childcare Subvention aimed at disadvantaged families.

These services are aimed at supporting the poorest mothers to get work or training and so increase their earnings and participation in the public realm beyond the home.

Telling political silence

Quite apart from the appalling and casual disregard for the women – parents and workers – shown by the company, the almost complete political silence has been telling.

Had it been 400 men who could suddenly not get to work, and 50 men suddenly dumped out of their jobs, would there not have been an almighty hue and cry?

It is difficult to tease out the reasons for the insidious sexism in Irish society that allow a work-related crisis for women to be treated with such shoulder-shrugging disregard.

The same sexism feeds into the everyday experience of many women at work. We feel it in the way male colleagues seem to ascend seamlessly the career path, overtaking better-qualified women. Could that be because, on a subconscious level, our male-dominated workplaces still see the men as the serious breadwinners, while women are just doing it for pin money? Even in cases where women are the sole breadwinner?

Perhaps there is a subconscious assumption that “she will be running off to school meetings”, or to bring the toddler to the doctor at the first sign of illness because, really, her heart is not in it. Once she has had kids, where she wants to be is in the private realm, at home.

Men may baulk at this, refuse to accept there could ever be gender bias in their workplaces, but they are rarely asked by their bosses how the children are, or told “I don’t know how you do it”. They don’t see it because they do not feel it, are not disappointed, put down, patronised or impoverished by it.

Women, and particularly poor women with children, face a far more exhausting fight than most men will ever know in seeking to achieve their share of economic and political capital in the public realm.

Many women will hope to achieve just enough so that they and their children can live with dignity.

Just as men take their private roles as fathers as seriously as they do their public jobs, mothers take our public roles as seriously as we do our private care-work. On a fundamental level, however, Irish society has yet to do so.

Subconscious sexism

Sadly, it is all too easy to tease out how subconscious sexism that sees women as inherently private beings has an impact on us. According to figures published by the National Women’s Council of Ireland five months ago, 50 per cent of women earn €20,000 per year or less; just 10 per cent of company board members are women; 63 per cent of lone parents and their children suffer deprivation; and the gender pay gap widened from 12.6 per cent to 14.4 per cent during the recession.

We feel this. It disappoints us, puts us down, patronises and impoverishes us.

At the heart of this is the failure of an Irish, male-dominated economy and politics to take the childcare crisis seriously. The State invests 0.2 per cent of GDP in preschool services, compared with an OECD average of 0.8 per cent. For children over four, there is all but zero state investment in after-school childcare.

This means that women continue to be expected to “figure out” the childcare arrangements. These arrangements, often ad hoc and private, can be unreliable. When they fail, as they have with a private provider in west Clare, it is usually the women expected to retreat to the private realm to figure out how, when or if they may return to the public.

Childcare is not just a private crisis. It is a public one.

A government that treated childcare as a necessary public service, one that requires significant public investment, would not only invest in the public good that is our children. Such a government would also challenge the insidious sexism that disappoints, patronises and impoverishes.