When the Kildare and Meath by-elections took place in 2005 we were led to believe that the single most pressing issue facing the country was the huge cost of child-care. 

I remember writing at the time that it was obviously a big issue in commuter-belt areas, but it was not necessarily as big an issue elsewhere.

Since then, the Government has introduced all sorts of expensive programmes to make child-care more affordable, meaning, of course, that parents who put their children into child-care end up being subsidised by parents who look after their children themselves. 

However, whenever we have debated child-care we have been more or less operating in the dark because we didn’t have a proper handle on the extent of demand for child-care. Now we have the necessary information courtesy of a report issued two days ago by the CSO. 

Coverage of this report concentrated almost exclusively on the high cost of child-care to those parents who have to put their children in child-care for all of every working day. What was missed, typically, was the elephant in the room, namely the fact that only a small minority of parents place their children in child-care, either full-time or part-time. 

To begin with, only one in ten children of primary school age have paid child-care at all, and most of them are looked after either in their home by an Au Pair or nanny, or by a paid relative, probably granny. 

In other words, only 4 per cent of primary school children are put in child-care centres, and even then that is for around 12 hours a week. The vast majority of primary school children are looked after either by a parent (81 per cent), or by an unpaid relative (nine per cent). 

Pre-school children spend more time in child-care than primary school children for obvious reasons; they’re too young for school to act as the ‘child-minder’ for half the day. 

But even still, only one-in-five pre-school children are looked after outside the home for part of each day (an average of 21 hours per week). The one-in-five are mainly in Montessori schools, playgroups etc. 

The bottom line is this; the vast majority of Irish children are looked after by their parents during the day. This being so, why are these parents almost invisible in terms of social policy? Why the obsessive focus on paid child-care when there is so little demand for it? Isn’t it time politicians, the media and policy-makers changed their tune on this issue?