Childcare Services
Dail Éireann — 2026-10-01
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Paul Murphy (PBP), Dublin South-West

This seems like an incredible situation. It is very stressful and shocking for the parents. Literally, on Monday gone they got a notification that their crèche place would be gone. What are they meant to do? They rely on this crèche. There are 44 kids in the crèche in TU Dublin in Tallaght. It is a mixture of children of staff, students and people from the community. If this goes ahead, the impact will be horrendous. One mother is quoted in the Tallaght Echo as saying she is in her second year of college and might have to abandon her studies as a consequence of losing this crèche place.
There is obviously a dispute between the operator of Oakview Crèche and TU Dublin as to the cause of this. There is some underlying issue. Work needed to be done in the building. The provision of air conditioning was required because the temperature was too high as identified a number of years ago by Tusla. That work has not happened. Then there is a dispute about exactly what has gotten us to this point and whether the parents should have been informed earlier by the operator of Oakview Crèche. That seems to be the case on the part of TU Dublin.
From my perspective the issue here is the rights of the parents, the children and the fact there is a building which can serve as a crèche and could remain open in January without any of the works taking place. Obviously, there will not be high temperatures in January. The works could take place. This building needs to operate as a crèche.
The main thing in terms of the Department is to contact TU Dublin to get to the bottom of this matter. If funding is necessary for the capital works that have been identified by Tusla to make this place work 100% appropriately as a crèche, then that funding should be provided rather than losing these crèche places when there is no prospect of these families getting any other crèche place for January. Do not throw parents into that disastrous situation.

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Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-10-01/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-10-05T01:01:00+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-10-01