Elections 2024: Childcare — We need grown-up decisions to achieve any kind of childcare nirvana
As A Prioritised Public Photo In File Good Sweden Childhood Is
On the first night of a visit to Stockholm last month, I decided to go for a walk around the city’s old town section, or Gamla Stan.
En route, drinking in the clean air, I came across a rumpus down a side street, with blue lights flashing. Going in for a closer look, I observed a pro-Palestine demonstration of several hundred people walking in convoy behind a police escort, some of the police armed with submachine guns.
It was one of, if not the, loudest demonstrations I’d ever seen. It was also impeccably well-behaved. It made me think of whether or not Sweden’s public services model is one Ireland could ever truly hope to emulate.
In aspirational terms, everyone appears to agree that the Scandinavian country is the gold standard in terms of childcare. But fundamentally, the two societies have little in common.
From early years advocates to politicians, it’s been made clear repeatedly in recent months with an election looming that there are models out there that work, if only we had the inclination to emulate them.
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It is certainly true, objectively, that the Swedish child and healthcare systems are a great deal more accomplished than our own.
In that country, free public healthcare is basically a reality, while here, nearly a decade after the cross-party announcement of Slaintecare and its commitment to abolishing the private model, we’re no closer to reaching that goal.
In terms of how childcare works in Sweden, no parent I spoke to had any complaints, and any mild gripes were definitely of the first-world-problem variety.
Realistically, there you can have a child in an exceptional standard of care system from 7am until 5pm daily for less than €200 per month. That's about a third of the cost of a typical creche in Ireland — and that’s after three years of fees being slashed here. Childhood is prioritised in Sweden as a public good.
In recent weeks, all our major parties (bar the Greens, the party which actually managed to reduce our own fees to a massive extent in the first place) have committed to the €200-per-month childcare nirvana.
Sinn Féin were first out of the traps in September, insisting that €10-a-day care would be achieved on their watch, at a cost of €345m, to be funded from Ireland’s (current) giant budget surplus.
This is where you could see issues occurring. In order to achieve what Sweden has, you need both time (the Swedes’ current system of public service was kickstarted 60 years ago) and the ability to make far-reaching, grown-up decisions for want of a better description.
Public services there are excellent, they are also funded by high taxes. Each municipality has responsibility for administering childcare in its own region. That responsibility doesn’t diminish in times of recession, or a national emergency.
Achieving that level of public service requires a commitment to collective pain across the population in terms of taxes for the common good. Where if you want to do something that’s not great for others — like driving a car in a city which already has fantastic public transport — then you are expected to pay more to do so.
It’s a socialist ideal I suppose, where income level does not dictate whether or not you can afford to have a child. It is however, objectively, a bit more fair.
In Ireland, we love a tax cut. There’s a reason why income tax reductions are thrown about like confetti at budget time — voters love them. They don’t love so much the swingeing cuts and austerity measures which follow when the Irish project fails every other generation.
But we seem willing to accept even that in return for a bit of excitement when times are good.
Ireland is a non-conformist society, in that we are not very good at conforming to the sorts of commitments that improving everyone’s lot would take. And our politicians know this.
In many ways this probably makes the personality of the nation a bit more lively than that of our Scandinavian cousins. We’re more craic, a bit more juvenile. In fairness to us, our republic is a lot, lot younger.
But what happens, in Sinn Féin’s plan for example, if the new American administration under Donald Trump scuppers our foreign investment strategies, American companies flee the coop, and we’re left with little or no budget surplus?
Do childcare fees go up again?
What about making provision for childcare businesses and workers, to underwrite their viability should the economy nosedive — which is a distinct possibility in the coming years given the trends currently being seen around the globe?
What about guaranteeing people a place for their child, regardless of where they live?
All that costs a lot of money to provide. Would our politicians commit to it? Would our fellow citizens agree to it?
To really dedicate ourselves to fixing Ireland’s childcare woes would require something of a wholesale re-think of what the State’s responsibilities to its citizens are.
Somehow I don’t think we’re quite there yet.