Single mother now needs a €44k per year job to pay cost of childcare

CHILDCARE costs in Ireland are the highest in Europe and with rising rents, two working parents with one child would need to earn at least €11 an hour in a full-time job to get by.

That is well above the current minimum wage of €8.65 an hour. The findings are made in a new study by the St Vincent de Paul research arm, the Vincentian Partnership.

Among a series of damning findings, the study recommends capping family payments at about 30% of the total childcare or creche costs, as is common in Europe.

It cites research into living costs which reveal growing barriers to parents taking up job opportunities due to soaring rents and childcare costs.

Placing a child in a crèche typically costs over 27% of average earnings – compared with an EU average of 11%.

Childcare costs in Germany, France, Belgium, Poland and Spain come in at less than 10% of average earnings.

The study found that childcare in Dublin now costs between €1,200 and €1,600 a month. Food, nappies and clothing cost between €53 and €88 a week and rent for a twobedroom flat or house comes in at €953 a month on average.

This means that to afford a socially acceptable minimum standard of living now takes one and a half times the minimum wage for a two-parent household with one child – each parent would need to be earning over €25,500 a year – almost €1,000 a week between them.

And a single parent with one child would need to earn over two and a half times the mini- mum wage – €44,250 a year or €850 a week – just to avoid poverty or hardship.

A one-child, two-parent household, with both adults employed full-time on the minimum wage would have a weekly income of just €664 after costs.

But a one-parent household, with one child and the adult employed full-time, would have a net weekly income of €516.

The study concludes: ‘Fulltime childcare costs, for a baby, are over 30% of dual minimumwage household income with two parents working. For a single working parent, the childcare costs are over 40% of their minimum wage income.’

And ironically social welfare can do little to help, it says: ‘One working parent on the minimum wage with one child receives significant social welfare support – almost €200 per week. But two working parents with one child do not qualify for means-tested social welfare payments when both adults are employed full-time on the minimum wage.’

Also, new requirements for carer qualifications means that costs are likely to rise, while low pay levels and job security in the childcare sector will increase pressure for higher pay, it said.

If childcare was free, each of the six family types in the study could just about survive on the current minimum wage, assuming they had full-time work and were not relying on ‘zero-hour’ or casual contracts.

One option is to increase Family Income Supports for those with younger children, though this might mean taxpayers subsiding low pay, the SVP warned.

Costs are expected to rise further