Rose Conway Walsh (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I come from rural Mayo. Home help and provision of care for the elderly is a huge problem right across the country but it is a particular problem in rural Ireland. I accept that home help is not the only care that needs to be provided. Between 2009 and 2010, in one year alone, 32,000 hours of home help were cut in County Mayo. There was not a problem in the provision of home care at that time but the decision was made for it to be cut. We were told it would not have any impact on the services provided. Elderly people are being medically assessed as needing home care and it is not being provided. The people on the ground do not have the resources to provide it and it is a huge problem. There has been an increase in the budget but despite that extra allocation in the budget, it is still not working. People are being assessed but are not getting the care required.

The hope that funding would trickle down has been mentioned. We can talk about this endlessly but we have to remember that older people who need this care, in some cases people who are 99 years of age, are not getting the care they need. It is a shame on all of us that it is not happening. There are people in their 80s and 90s trying to care for other people in their 80s and 90s and they are not able to do it. The impact it is having on their physical and mental health as carers is astounding and is completely wrong.

The other problem is in the provision of care and the availability of carers. There are some parishes that have no care available. One of the solutions to that is to revert back to the provision of one hour of care. The result is we have been telling elderly people they are not even worth one hour of home care, which is wrong. Can the witnesses see that happening? Can we force the Government to reverse the situation so that people get one hour? Forget about the 30 minutes or 45 minutes nonsense of people running across rural parishes trying to provide care - we cannot expect people to do that and to sit into their cars and drive for 30 minutes.

The witness was right when he spoke about connecting people. How can a person providing care to people in their own homes connect with people when the basic essentials have to be done in 30 minutes? It is not possible for any human being to do that. It concerns me that while we have all the right words for providing care for people in their own homes and it is our policy, we do not have the funding. It should not be a case of the funding trickling down; it should be there and not somewhere else waiting for a hand down. It should be there within communities to provide home care once the medical assessment is made that it is needed. I do not want to wait another number of years for that to happen. It is a decision that could and should be made immediately. When the assessment is done, the home care should be provided. I empathise with the people in home help offices who are trying to provide this care.

They are listening to families and must hear their stories every day of the week. The impact on them as workers trying to provide this care is totally wrong. We need the funding for it, not just the fancy words. I accept that it can be provided in different ways, but it was a major policy mistake to privatise what was already working. I would never advise going backwards, but we must go back and look at the models that were in place before all these drastic cuts started. Where is the money going? If people are saying all this money is being provided, where is it going in the system? It is not going to the 99 year old who is desperately waiting for help to get out of bed in the morning and so forth. People in rural areas are hugely dependent on proper home care. This is happening alongside half of the beds being cut in the local community hospital, so people do not have the respite and supports that were available heretofore. There must be an absolute urgency on that.

However, I am asking the witness about the one hour. Can the witness see if this business of 30 minutes and 45 minutes can be abolished? What would it take to do away with that as a policy decision across the board?