TEN Cork creche kids diagnosed with tuberculosis in two weeks. Are your kids safe?

As medical scare stories go, this one has it all. You've got a disease associated with Angela's Ashes suddenly bubbling up in gleaming Eire Nua.

Infection rate nearly doubling, from 9.6 per 100,000 in 2000 to more than 17 per 100,000 a couple of years ago, not counting the most recent cases.

Then you have its method of transmission - an adult childcare worker who brought the disease to two creches in Cork.

Our first proper creche crisis. Our impoverished past stalks us. We cannot escape it.

Microbes with long memories reach deep into the lungs of our children whom we have left in the care of dark foreign strangers as a consequence and enabler of our prosperity.

As Nuala O Faolain has pointed out on these pages, Mn� na h�ireann are the toooften unsung Celtic Tigresses who made the whole thing roar.

The collapse of cultural constraints on the role of women saw a sudden surge of female participation in the workforce that, by the mid-1990s, was approaching European norms.

It is a vital and unjustly dismissed component of Irish prosperity.

The presence of mothers is disruptive to workplaces designed along 19th-century bourgeois industrial lines. Man earns salary and pension.

Woman bears and then raises kids and makes the tea. The last decision she ever makes is to say 'I do', with no control over her finances, fertility or future. The offence that such a status quo gave to any idea of natural justice has now been recognised, even in Ireland, by all but the most paleolithic and recrudescent "values" crusaders. So, first by choice and then by need in order to afford a house you'd actually want to live in, women of childbearing age are very much part of the workforce across just about every industry. And though women in Ireland have increasingly delayed having children until their 30s, we are a nation neck-deep in nappies - and many mums go back to work. Haltingly, a patchwork childcare industry has grown up to meet demand, with small operations popping up to meet local needs.

Managers struggle to fairly manage parents who must stay home because a child is ill or the childminder hasn't turned up (because her own kid is sick). Flexible work is great. Real broadband would make it better. But projects still have deadlines and the client doesn't want to know about your childcare issues.

So many, if not most, parents will instead say that they themselves are ill - leading the Small Firms Association to demonise these "absentee" workers as if they have snuck off to the pub.

The TB crisis, however, feeds into Ireland's secret civil war. The creche families versus the stay-athomes. There are resentments over class, values and status between parents who put their kid in creche and then close a billion-euro-deal the day after the birth and those who stay at home to breastfeed the child until he's 10, and every shade between. But those are meaningless abstractions compared with the snot-laden creche toddler wiping its goo all over your perfect stay-at-home son.

Creches are petri dishes, incubating germs at a rate faster than the Pasteur Institute. That TB cases could go unnoticed says something alarming about the background rate of respiratory infection at creches, the noncreche families think. The creche parents feel guilty for about 10 minutes after putting down their newspaper and realise they have a bigger-thanever mortgage payment in two weeks.

We'll be seeing a lot more childcare scare stories, and eventually a Leas Cross-style scandal. You'll hear about reports like the 2006 CD Howe Institute study on nine years of universal state-sponsored childcare in Canada ($7 per day), showing a marked increase in maternal depression, family break-ups and childhood illness among families with kids in creche versus stay-at-home families.

You'll hear about the 2005 study that showed a decrease in leukemia in later life among kids who were at creche during their first year. Frustrated 'gap mums'. You'll hear a lot of conflicting data until there's a proper inspection regime for creches, followed by an industry consolidation leaving a few corporate childcare providers waiting to standardise the whole thing at a profit.

Until then you'll hear the cough, see the runny nose - and worry.