Tyrone mothers plead for funding to help pay daycare costs

Where one might be forgiven for thinking the right to free childcare sounds like a staple feature of any fair society, the reality in the North could not be further from the truth.

Trudie Gillilands, who spent nine years as a classroom assistant in the Loreto Convent Grammar School Omagh, recently had to quit her job after her daughter was born.

As it stands, there are no measures in place to support local parents that wish to secure for their children this vital necessity.

In the absence of any financial aid from the government, Ms Gillilands, who lives between Omagh and Fintona, eventually took the decision to leave work.

Speaking with the UH earlier this week, Ms Gillilands, who hopes to someday return to full-time work, explained that she ‘needs help now’.

“I have been watching what has been happening in Stormont and while it is welcome to see them talking about putting a support package in place, it needs to come quickly.

“I need help now and know that plenty of other people do as well.”

Trudie is a mother-of-three, her eldest being nine and her youngest only 16 months.

“With the first two, I was just a bout able to afford to continue to work.

”By the time Rachel was born though, it no longer made financial sense,” explained Ms Gillilands.

Some time after her new daughter joined the family, Trudie and her partner began pricing childcare.

“I could not believe how expensive it had got since my first two went.

“It was not cheap the, but the lowest price I could find for Rachel was £800 a month.

“That would have been two months of mortgage payments for us. I couldn’t justify it, so we decided I would have to drop out of work.”

Since then, Ms Gillilands has been trying to find daytime cleaning work, her mother kindly having offered to look after Rachel a few days a week if she can.

“My partner works away which means I have all three of my children in the evening, but I hate relying on other people for money.

“However, the few small cleaning jobs I had managed to get recently fell through, so I am back to asking for money every time I need anything.

“Hopefully the assembly get something through quickly, because, to be honest, we really need it at the minute.”

Another local parent also told us how she had to take a ‘leap of faith’ into self-employment in order to mitigate childcare costs.

“When I had my second (child), I had to go into my boss and tell him that I was going to have to leave,” explained Clara Maybin, a social media marketer from Killyclogher.

“He understood, because I probably wasn’t the first.

“I had been in that job for six years and I loved it, but when I had had Bella, staying in that job just did not make sense.

“I would be dropping the girls off at 7am, picking them up at 5pm, and barely making any money once the childcare costs came out of my wage. I was feeling guilty and financially I was getting very little out of it.”

However, Ms Maybin has managed to make the arrangement work, but acknowledges that not everybody has the same options available that she had.

“When you are deciding whether or not to have more children, whether you are going to be able to afford the childcare is something that can seriously hinder your ability to do it.

“I know plenty of people who have spaced out their pregnancies so that by the time one child needs to be registered with a playgroup, the other is going into school.

“I had a reasonably lucky set-up, but there are plenty of people who have to kiss their careers goodbye because they can’t cough up for exorbitant childcare costs.”