Martin Conway (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Minister of State is very welcome to Seanad Éireann. He served two terms here with me and we had the same assistant, Marian, working for both of us for a long time. I am delighted for the Minister of State personally and I have no doubt he will bring a wealth of experience to the role, having been an MEP, Senator and TD. It is fitting he is in the House to address this very important issue.

I will pick up on something Senator Byrne referred to, which was the pandemic. The narrative in the discussion on loneliness post pandemic has very much changed to what it would have been pre-pandemic. It is very timely our good friends and colleagues in the Green Party have brought this motion before the Seanad to amplify the issues and the learnings that are there from the Covid-19 period. For many years I was a board member of the National Council for the Blind of Ireland, now known as Vision Ireland, and during the pandemic it set up a telephone support service where people rang visually impaired and blind people who were living alone and who did not necessarily have family. They might have had home health or a carer coming in once a week or once a day for an hour. That system is still up and running to this day because it was so successful and brought such benefit, joy, conversation and connections to people who were living alone and had an eyesight problem. Such was that need that it continued and continues to be met to this day. A couple of thousand phone calls are made every week to people with vision impairment who live alone, and this is supported by Vision Ireland. There are positives from the pandemic.

One other positive from the pandemic was the Covid response groups run by the councils. In County Clare the Covid response committee, which was a multi-agency committee, brought volunteers and people who, together with the State agencies, gave assistance and reached out to many people. What I worry about is that people had contact during the pandemic because there was a structure in place to have contact and people do not necessarily have that contact now. Because we are back to normal, these Covid response teams have been stood down. The point of the motion to mandate the local authorities to come up with a strategy is absolutely on the ball. The structure, the experience and the expertise is there from the Covid response, which I think in most cases worked very well.

It is a commitment in the programme for Government but I very much believe it needs to be front and centre because, as Senator Boyhan said, we are into the last year of the Government, and while this is a political issue, it is certainly not a political football in any shape or form, because all parties would agree that with an ageing population and people living alone, this is something that very much needs to be taken head on.

When Senator Byrne was talking about canvassing and meeting people, it brought me back to some of the horrendous circumstances I encountered during my many years of canvassing, where some people were living in diabolical conditions in rural Ireland with probably no contact at all. With the health challenges these people had, in some cases they had no central heating, contact or phone. In one case I remember there was no television. As a society we need to wrap our arms around these people and mind, help and support them.

This is one of the most important Private Members' motions we have had in this House in a very long time. I wholeheartedly support it and commend our Green Party colleagues and friends on tabling it.