VICTORIA WHITE: When it comes to childcare, Ireland is closer to America than Europe

Two-thirds of crèches nationwide have vacancies… 20,000 cots and tubby chairs which need to be filled, writes Victoria White in The Irish Examiner

THIS country is beginning to feel more and more like the rogue European state where US companies have more of a say than people.

We are seventh from the bottom of the OECD league when it comes to spending on maternity and parental leave, with only Greece, Israel, Chile, New Zealand, Korea, and Turkey behind us, while the US doesn’t feature at all. Countries at the top of the league, Luxembourg, Norway, Estonia, Finland, and Sweden spend six or seven times as much as we do.

The European countries which offer three years of parental leave include Austria, France, Estonia, Poland, Germany, Spain, Lithuania, Slovakia, Hungary, Finland, Sweden, the Czech Republic, and Norway (if each parent takes a year).

Even the UK offers a legal right to part-time work after a year’s maternity leave. But the only paid option in Ireland for the care of your baby from six months to three years is a place in one of Katherine Zappone’s crèches.

We’re just not European. We’re designing our childcare system to suit American multi-nationals. America is the only country in the OECD which has no statutory maternity leave at all and American employers don’t like those long parental leaves one little bit.

Nor does the OECD which did lots of tut-tutting about Austrian womens’ slow pace of return to the workforce after their three years off in their study, Babies and Bosses (2005). The terrible effects of all this slouching around are there to be seen in Austria’s child poverty rate of 8.7%, something of a contrast with the US rate of 23.1%.

Read the full article on The Irish Examiner