We will soon see the NDP. Will it address the serious issues in early childhood provision, where we have a massive scarcity of childcare places? Most of these places provide less than 20 hours per week. We have a lot of public assets through which childcare opportunities are not being opened. Could we see the start of a strategy for capital and development planning in the early childhood sector in the NDP?

The NDP is fundamentally about the allocation of capital funding, which dovetails and aligns with current policies and programmes that individual Departments and the Government collectively have identified and prioritised. The Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, in particular, has identified the requirements for childcare into the future in terms of the funding that will be required over the lifetime of the plan and in terms of the Estimates on a multi-annual basis. That is the context in which childcare policy will evolve. One of the challenges facing childcare policy has been how it has evolved historically, unlike other educational provision. From age zero to six, we have a multiplicity of different groups and providers from State actors to the private and community sectors. It is not easy to get a single solution to it if we are honest about it. That is the problem with the challenge we face.