This Government has committed £250 million to the child care measure under the National Development Plan 2000-2006. In April of this year, I announced the availability of capital and staffing grants for child care providers under the equal opportunities child care programme.
Since I announced these measures in April, more than 140 requests for application forms have been received from County Meath. To date, three completed applications for funding have been returned. These three applications were for capital funding from private child care providers. Of these, two of the projects have been approved for funding totalling approximately £34,000. The third application is under consideration. The Minister of State at this Department, Deputy Mary Wallace, addressed the annual conference of the Irish Pre-school Playgroup Association in Meath last weekend and appealed to existing and new providers to return their completed grant application forms to my Department. My Department has no closing date on the childcare grants scheme to facilitate the return of application forms but we can obviously only allocate money when applications are submitted.