Parents may have to pay higher fees for less service when childcare centres reopen.
Early Childhood Ireland will tell the Oireachtas Covid-19 committee today that more state funding’s needed to avoid that.
It will say the coronavirus crisis has worsened the sector’s crisis.
Up to 1,800 centres can reopen next Monday, while another 2,700 are due to reopen in late August.
Teresa Heeney, chief executive of Early Childhood Ireland, says parents can’t make up the funding shortfall:
“There’s an enormous amount of work that still has to be done to get the rest of the sector reopened, we dont even know for example as of today, how many services are going to be reopened next Monday, how many parents are going to come back, which all speaks to the fact this particular sector is very vulnerable and really needs vastly increased levels of investment in order to make a sustainable secure sector” she said.
