A Tipperary childcare provider has renewed calls for creche and playschool staff to be vaccinated in light of the recent rise in cases in the sector.
The most high profile of these was in Co Offaly, with twelve children and eight staff contracting Covid.
Despite the fact that many creches and child care providers have remained open during lockdown, staff are not deemed to be frontline workers and so do not feature in the initial stages of the vaccine roll out.
Darren Ryan from Clonmel Childcare says this is not acceptable and is hypocritical of the Government.
“We are the only sector of education that has remained open – it’s the hypocrisy that really gets to you because Micheál Martin did acknowledge that we are essential workers but yet they will not acknowledge that by putting us into that cohort on the vaccination access programme.”
“We are still down at number 11 – we should be at 4 or 5 which is the essential workers cohort. That’s what we’re looking for.”
