18/12/2025
⚠️Early Years is at a breaking point and pretending otherwise helps no one.⚠️
Today’s events have again pushed our sector into public view. When that happens, it brings a familiar mix of hope, frustration, and deep exhaustion for those running services across the country.
Yesterday, Federation of Childhood Providers Ireland shared some of our views on RTÉ One News and this morning on Virgin Media Ireland Ireland AM to reflect a reality providers have been living with for years:
The pressures are real.
They are ongoing.
And they cannot be smoothed over with language that doesn’t match daily experience.
That moment mattered. Not because it fixes everything, but because it ensured reality was heard.
This is not about resilience. It’s about reality.
Across Ireland, those running early years services are carrying extraordinary responsibility. They manage teams, care for children, support families, meet regulatory demands, and hold services together. Often while quietly worrying about whether their service can survive another year.
When so many providers feel stretched, anxious, or unsure about the future, that is not a personal failing.
It is a system under strain.
Here is the contradiction at the heart of the system:
Early Years is treated as:
• a public service, with heavy regulation and social responsibility
• and a private business, without control over income or rising costs
This contradiction isn’t being resolved.
It’s being managed poorly year after year, by asking providers to absorb the pressure.
Providers are subject to fee freezes, while costs continue to rise.
Wages, insurance, utilities, food, materials, pensions, compliance costs and more are all increasing.
Core Funding increases, where they occur, are minimal and quickly swallowed by unavoidable costs, leaving little or no real relief at service level.
At the same time, providers are required to implement ERO wage increases while operating under capped income and not knowing the further costs and financially negative policies that are coming in the next wave. Funding does not cover the full cost of employment, including PRSI, pensions, sick pay, non-contact time, and more.
No amount of goodwill can make those numbers balance.
“Core Funding is unfortunately a choice without real choice” - Christopher Moran FECP Operations
Some services simply cannot afford to enter Core Funding without risking their viability. That is a financial reality, not a lack of commitment.
Yet services that have no option but to remain outside Core Funding are increasingly penalised year on year. Through reduced access to schemes, tighter restrictions, and growing disadvantage. While those in core funding pray that the next phase will have more funding than costs to bring some relief.
This issue with in and out of core funding has created an exclusionary system where:
• participation is framed as optional,
• but non-participation carries escalating consequences.
• with those in core funding subject to fee freezes unable to leave now as they have made the huge financial investment into their service that’s now in the red, the list goes on.
That is not a level playing field.
It is not sustainable.
And it must stop.
On “partnership” and consultation
Meaningful consultation means access to drafts, timelines, and real opportunities to influence decisions before they are final.
Being informed after the fact is not consultation.
When lived experience doesn’t match official narratives, it is reasonable and necessary to question the process.
People don’t open childcare services to get rich.
But they also don’t open them to struggle.
There is a quiet grief in watching work you care deeply about become harder to sustain each year, and a quiet strength in continuing to show up despite that strain.
Children are not protected by exhausting and financially draining the people who nurture and care for them. Quality grows where those providing it feel respected, secure, and supported.
Progress matters, but it isn’t enough
There are positive steps:
• growing public recognition of early years professionalism
• acknowledgement that this is skilled, meaningful work
• some possible reduction in administrative burden
• provider voices increasingly present in national discussion
These steps matter. They show that speaking up makes a difference.
But they do not replace the need for real, structural change.
What happens next matters
FECP has called a meeting on 7th January with sector representative bodies to present a clear, coordinated plan for collective action after an overwhelmingly strong appetite by members to do so focused on fairness, viability, and respect for providers and our sector as a whole.
This work is careful, deliberate, and rooted in lived experience.
Early Years cannot survive on goodwill alone.
Fee freezes alongside rising costs are damaging the sector.
Penalising providers for financial reality is not reform.
Silence is not consent.
Struggle should not be normalised.
This has to stop.
FECP
Join us at www.fecp.ie