TEN distraught mothers of young children telephone Barnardo's national children's resource centre every day because they are in the midst of the same personal crisis: a desperate need for good childcare. A common theme is the first time mother who has doubts about the care she has found and has so little money left after paying for it out of her after tax income that she wonders if working outside the home is worth it at all.
Ann Canavan, who talks to these parents, thinks that the steady flow of calls speaks for itself. "It's a nightmare for parents," she says. "They have to choose between nurseries, childminders and creches and in the absence of any kind of regulation, they have to be judge and jury on them all."
Many of the parents ask Ann to send them a list of registered childminders or a list of approved creches. But these do not exist in a country where there are no statutory guidelines governing the vast array of private childcare services which have been set up to meet the growing demand.
EU statistics show that the younger her children, the more likely an Irish mother is to be employed. Thirty one per cent of Irish mothers with a child under the age of two are in employment and 25 per cent of Irish mothers with children aged three to nine also work outside the home.
And the trend is booming. In the years from 1985 to 1991, Ireland had the third largest increase in the EU in terms of the proportion of mothers of young children in employment, from 8 per cent to 30 per cent. The latest CSO statistics show that there are at least 174,600 women at work who have children at home. More than one third of these mothers 67,600 have at least one child under the age of five.
Who is minding their children while they are at work? The honest answer is, anyone can. There are no police checks, no psychological evaluation and no monitoring of childminders' activities. The Republic of Ireland is the only country in the EU without a national system of statutory regulation of childminders. Tens of thousands of Irish children - the leaders and the parents of the future - are being cared for by a vast, unregulated industry which operates largely on the black market.
The crisis Will be partially addressed by Part VII of the Child Care Act, 1991, which is due to be implemented before the end of the year. But the Act covers only service providers caring for more than three pre school children other than their own. Women caring for three children or fewer make up the vast majority of childminders, according to the Irish Childminders Association, and they will continue to be unregulated. The Irish Childminders Association is among the organisations which view the Act as grossly deficient; others include the National Creche and Nurseries Association and some nanny employment agencies.
"THERE is a crisis in childcare," says Noirin Hayes, head of the school of social sciences at the Dublin Institute of Technology, where childcare professionals are trained. "There is an ad hoc development of services by private and voluntary organisations and that cannot ensure that where services are needed they will emerge. Services are developing in isolation because there are no national statutory guidelines to measure and ensure the quality of the services. There are no standards in relation to ratios, training and good practice. But while the lack of a national strategy is dreadful, the voluntary and private organisations which are trying to co ordinate childcare are to be, applauded for what they are trying to achieve.
Considering the government's fire brigade approach to childcare in the past in which children have been severely abused or even allowed to die before politicians stirred themselves into action, the government's failure to take childcare seriously begs a terrifying question. Will there have to be a childminding equivalent of the Kelly Fitzgerald case before anything is done?
Mary Breslin, who runs a licensed employment agency for childminders and nannies in Blackrock, Co Dublin, does not believe that it is scaremongering to fear the worst. "There is a vast unregulated business of unlicensed childminding agencies going on in back kitchens with absolutely no safeguards against a range of possible abuses, including paedophilia and other types of child abuse as well as abuse of the carer herself," she says.
In the absence of guidelines, standards and the monitoring of training, the only way parents know if they have chosen a good childminder is to see how their children react. But this wait and see approach is nerve wracking, to say the least.
"Are children being harmed? It's hard to tell," says Noirin Hayes. "There is no doubt, however, that the stress on parents is compromising their position in relation to their own kids. It's hard to be a good parent if you are under stress because your childcare arrangements are unreliable or causing you to worry."
Dr Sheila Greene, senior lecturer in psychology at Trinity College Dublin, believes that parents must put childcare on the political agenda if anything is to change: "My view is that people in Ireland have an attitude that their own children are their own business, and that if they want to indulge in having children they have to do all the arrangements themselves and cannot expect the Government or their employers to do anything for them. Until that attitude changes, things will stay as they are."