08/10/2025
🚨⚠️ BUDGET 2026 ⚠️🚨
A few quotes come to mind as we speak to members…
“We Got Nothing — Not a Cent”
“Ignoring Our Calls for Help and Launching Building Blocks Expansion Grants… It’s Like Paying for a Celebrating Enough Funding for a Bike Shed While the House Falls Down.”
“Each Budget feels like we are loosing our businesses, We Will Not Stay Quiet.”
To our Members, our Educators, Parents and the Irish Public:
We came to the table in good faith.
We brought evidence.
We brought data.
We brought the truth.
Costed, proven, and backed by every inch of reality on the ground.
And what did we get?
Nothing.
Announcements before budget of an extra hour under the ECCE scheme without consultation. We find out on social media. How is this respectful ?
Not one reform to AIM. Children who are under 2.8 months left with no supports. We are on a wing and a prayer.
Not a whisper of an increase of funding in the direction of our European counterparts.
Not a word on infant care issues. How is this supporting working parents I ask?
Not a single plan to stem the closures that are hollowing out Ireland’s early years sector.
The only strategic plan I see is to close more services down.
Some areas are under subscribed with services and other areas are so over subscribed leaving empty places.
Where is the mapping process to show where the issues are?
Rural Ireland falling apart. Small Ecce services forced out of businesses in one clean swoop.
The only mention of the fee caps is how the department will bring fees down even lower next year with no extra funding to cover the cost of doing business. This must be questioned.
We hear of more ring fenced funding for our Early Years Educators greatly appreciate as always.
But how would many services remain open. Rooms closed as we cannot find staff.
It’s hard to believe this was not an oversight.
Was this a choice ?
A deliberate political decision to abandon?
It Feels Like A Kick in the Teeth to a Sector Already on Its Knees?
After holding this country’s childcare system together through years of chaos. Through underfunding, burnout, recruitment collapse, and rising costs.
This is the thanks we get?
We laid out practical, costed solutions that would have saved AIM, stabilised providers, and secured the future of early childhood care.
They saw every one of them — and still nothing.
Surely they know what’s happening. They’ve seen the collapse. And they did nothing.
Are we in the dark on a wider plan here to put our sector out of business?
Building Blocks Grants
In this Budget, the Government announced with great fanfare a “Building Blocks” fund to expand childcare infrastructure.
But here’s the truth:
You can build all the public services in areas but how will you staff them.
You don’t pour into new bricks and mortar when existing services are shutting their doors due to the issues we raise continuously .
More than 759 services have already closed.
How many have to go before someone with common steps in ?
Infant places are vanishing.
Across the country there are huge waiting lists & places half empty… The whole plan is an array of mismanagement.
Staff are leaving faster than we can hire.
Providers are running national childcare infrastructure from their own pockets.
We cannot continue to foot the bill for someone else’s mistakes..
The ship is sinking and instead of grabbing a bucket, they watch it happen.
If even a fraction of thought had gone into stabilising existing providers.
Raising ECCE capitation, fixing AIM, funding infant care, supporting staff mental health, this crisis could have been turned around.
Instead, the Government has chosen optics over outcomes.
They will claim they’ve “invested in wages” with €45 million in new funding.
Let’s call it what it is, survival money, not support.
They gave it because they know providers can no longer afford to increase the rates if pay for Early Years Educators. News flash we are in historical fee caps. The Core Funding is seriously flawed.
They tied our hands with fee freezes, stripped our flexibility with broken Core Funding, and then expected us to be grateful for scraps.
That’s not fairness. That’s farce.
The Government claims “record participation” in Core Funding..
we need the full breakdown of service types in Core Funding as the numbers are not adding up.
One newspaper saying 84% sign up another one saying 89% which is it How are these figures so different on the same day. school-age services are rising while early years services continue to fall.
Many providers were told to split their service into two registrations, inflating the totals.
The truth?
The losses are far higher than the official 700+.
This isn’t record uptake. It’s record exit.
This Is Not Partnership
Bills arrive monthly.
Staff leave weekly.
Parents panic daily.
This isn’t partnership.
We fears it may be a managed decline dressed up as dialogue.
We Are Angry — And We Are Done Being Ignored
We are the people holding Ireland’s Early Years system together, not politicians, not policy papers.
We are the Educators, the Providers, the Managers, the Parents and the Carers who get up every morning to serve children, families, and communities.
And we are finished being silenced.
To our members: Your anger is justified.
To the public: Know this…The people caring for your children are being driven to the edge.
To the Government:
This is only going to get worse.
We are not asking anymore.
We are demanding.
We are taking action.
We are not whispering for change.
We are roaring for survival.
Our Demands
1. Immediate reopening of the fee cap process with transparency of methodology.
2. ECCE capitation increase to real, sustainable levels.
3. Urgent resolution of AIM to insure all children with needs in our service are fully supported under AIM.
4. Pay our sector for the masses of assessments of needs that we undertake because your system is broken. Yet another thing we do for children in our services.
5. Reform of Core Funding before more exits.
6. Mental health supports for providers and staff.
7. Commitment to EU-average funding within three to five years (0.71% of GDP).
These are not requests. They are rescue measures.
This Budget wasn’t a breakthrough; it was a breaking point.
You cannot build on broken ground.
You cannot expand a system you refuse to sustain.
And you cannot call it “record investment” when the people delivering the service got nothing.
We got nothing. Not a cent. Time for an action plan.
Just talk of expansion grants — it’s like paying for a bike shed while the house falls down.
This time, we won’t stay quiet.
This time, we fight back.
Enough is enough.
