Róisín Shortall (Dublin North West, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

As of now, they are not in the prioritised as a specific group.

I want to move on now to the fact that we find ourselves yet again in a situation where there are extremely high rates of the virus and deaths in the nursing home sector. It is hard to believe we are back in this situation given the experience of last April and May. Yet again, NPHET is expressing serious concern about the very high numbers similar to last April and May and it has referenced a deteriorating epidemiological profile in long-term residential care facilities. Have we not learned lessons from that first wave, which was so tragic? There were three lessons identified at that point from that awful experience. The first was that there was no clinical oversight of private sector nursing homes and that the State was operating an arm's length approach to older people's care. There was a major gap in services and no clinical oversight of private nursing homes.

The second lesson that we talk about is the fact it is not an ideal situation for older people to find themselves in congregated settings. It is not ideal from a health perspective, certainly in a pandemic, and also not ideal socially. The third area was the chronic under-funding of homecare. Those three lessons were identified by the expert panel and they have been known for a long time by many of the advocacy groups working with older people, particularly Sage. It was also recognised at a political level. Those of us in opposition have recognised these for a long time and it was recognised at Government level last summer that these were lessons that had to be learned, and that we had to find a new model of care for supporting and caring for older people.

I am asking about those three areas that had been well flagged and identified last summer: the lack of clinical oversight; the fact many older people are in congregated settings and we needed a new model of care and a statutory right to homecare; and the under-funding of social care for older people. What has been done about those three major areas that had been identified last summer?