Pat Buckley (Cork East, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the representatives for attending. Where do I start? We are back here again. In the opening statement, Mr. Fitzgerald said his organisation is working very hard to ensure every resident's transition is supported as much as possible. We are not talking about individual cases here but about more than one. Mr. Fitzgerald will be aware that the engagement with the residents of Owenacurra Centre on the transition has not been very good. It has been worrying. Some of the family members have approached me on the possibility of coercion and on how there has been no engagement with them.

The HSE's submission refers to the rationale for closure. It states that as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, the works were delayed. However, there were works prior to that. I have a record of works that were supposed to have been done in 2016. That is well before the onset of Covid. I have said before that the HSE is the landlord–proprietor of the buildings. We will talk specifically about Owenacurra. The spin seems to be that it is the Mental Health Commission's fault because it has said the place is not fit for purpose. It is telling the truth but my argument is that the HSE, as proprietor, should have been maintaining the buildings all along. This never happened. It is now handy for the HSE to say that, because the building is not fit for purpose, it will just close it and move the patients out. They are not patients; they are residents.

It is not just a question of the building and the area but of all the services that go with the centre. I include long- and short-term respite and chiropody services. The dentist is across the road. The centre is fully integrated. I met a resident of the centre in my own town last Thursday. He had the luxury of being able to go down the main street. He was sitting outside a shop having a cup of coffee and some chocolate cake. He will not be able to do that at St. Catherine's or Sarsfield Court. He would be better off in Fota than in Sarsfield Court because he is not going to meet anyone there.

The HSE is on about the best possible outcomes for these people. The HSE is moving them from the Owenacurra because of the compliance rating, yet the two premises it wants to put them into are less compliant. On top of that, the system seems to be working perfectly right now, despite the delegates' statement that the building is not fit for purpose. The staff have not been treated very fairly given the lack of information on what is going on. Members of the public have signed the petition. There is much public anger and in a petition several weeks ago, we collected over 600 signatures, of which I can give a sample.

Those were the points I wanted to make but I also want to refer to the size of the building and what is needed. The delegates know the location of Owenacurra Centre and that the community hospital is across the road. There are many acres across the road there are not built on. It is possible to do a new build there while the remaining residents stay in situin Owenacurra Centre.

Let me outline the fear. I have not heard anything about the ten-bed unit the delegates are talking about, who is building it and whether planning permission has been sought or approved. It is pie in the sky. These things take a very long time. The demand for the services exists. There were 26 on a waiting list for the two short-term beds before Covid. I have had five cases in my office in the past three weeks looking for identical services in the area but we cannot get them in anywhere.

Between 2000 and 2002, there were 69 suicides in east Cork.

One can add more onto that, up to 2022. We have an ageing population. I am sure the HSE has data similar to what we have with constituency dashboards on demographics to show what is going on. One can predict, more or less, what will happen.

The biggest fear here is that the 600 people plus who signed those petitions and I do not believe that we will get the same level of care in Midleton and east Cork, specifically on respite and mental health services and the additional day mental health services. The fear is that once the service is gone, it is gone. It looks like this is being replicated in other parts of the country. I watched a while ago on the news about the scaling down of services in Bantry. We have the community health centre out the road in Castlemartyr being scaled down because it is not fit for purpose. There seems to be a tsunami in this regard.

Mr. Fitzgerald stated in his statement: "Our priority now is to work with the remaining residents to identity new homes for them, which will meet their needs as assessed by medical experts, as well as their own will and preference." The only medical expert is the person himself or herself who is living in the Owenacurra Centre. They call that their home. We spoke to them repeatedly. Their preference is to stay at home and their home is the Owenacurra Centre. They have told me St. Catherine's is not their home and Sarsfield Court is certainly not their home. There is a rights-based issue here as well. The HSE is saying the building is not fit for purpose. The HSE should leave those people there - it has the facilities across the road to expand - and replace it with what the HSE wants, that is, a modern up-to-date proper service, but do it in tandem.

The public trust has been lost. That is sad to say. We are dealing with some of the most vulnerable people in society who most of the time do not have the capacity for decision-making. It is a pity that the decision support services are not up and running because I would be reporting the HSE on this as a human rights issue, not as an aesthetic issue. They are all talking about a building and a service. I do not care about that. That is the HSE's problem because that is where it failed at the start. The HSE did not maintain it. The HSE cannot blame Brexit for it. It cannot blame Covid for it because we have the documents here. There were repairs to be carried out, in 2016 and 2017. Therefore, we are not buying that.

I do not think Mr. Fitzgerald is able to give a commitment on what I am looking and hoping for here. What the people of Midleton and east Cork want is to maintain all the existing services, not to break any of them. If that building cannot be rebuilt or refurbished, the HSE should build a new, proper one with the same number of beds in Midleton and keep it integrated within the town and community-led.

Mr. Fitzgerald stated that, "A suitable property, located within Midleton, is being purchased...". Has a property been bought in Midleton or not? We need to know.

This "ten-bed ... focused residential unit in Midleton ... [with] 24-hour staffing ...". That "24-hour staffing" seems to be a new one. Are St. Catherine's and the other one outlined above staffed on a 24-hour basis?

Mr. Fitzgerald also stated: "Our plan for residential mental health services in the east Cork area will ultimately deliver a modern service into the future in line with Government policy." That, "into the future", is the problem. This could take ten or 20 years. What happens to all those people who need services? It will be gone.

I have a lot to say on this. This is not a personal attack on the HSE officials. It is an attack on the system which is not working but on which, we hope, with the HSE officials' support, we could work together.

We have received responses from the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Public Petitions. We also have a response from the Joint Committee on Health. It states that the Joint Committee on Public Petitions fully supports the Joint Committee on Health in expressing its dissatisfaction and concern with the Minister of State at the Department of Health with responsibility for older people and mental health, Deputy Mary Butler, on the decision that the Owenacurra Centre is to be closed and also calls on the Minister of State to reverse the decision urgently. It states that it is enclosing for my own information the text of the petition as provided by the petitioner in addition to a link to the meeting of the Joint Committee on Public Petitions on 7 July 2022. It also states that they did not buy the HSE's original submission on why the building was not fit for purpose. We are still not buying it. We do not want to be dragging them in here every day, every week or every month, but the biggest problem here is we have been going over a year, we have been told the same story over and over again, yet we have seen zero concrete evidence that anything is moving forward.

All that is moving in Midleton, in that Owenacurra Centre at present, is residents being moved out. I am being honest here. It is not of their free will. How can one push people out of a residential unit that they class as their home? Surely there is a constitutional requirement, as a human being never mind as a professional, to give those residents the best level of care possible and also respect their rights and wishes to remain in that centre.

In summary, and I thank the Chair's indulgence and patience on this, I would like to know if the HSE has bought any premises in Midleton. I would like to know if the HSE has looked at building a new centre across the road. I would like to know why we are going from 22 beds down to a ten-bed unit when we have a growing population. Cork city, Cork county and the east Cork populations are predicted to grow by over 12% in the next couple of years. Can we get clarity on why this is happening in this day and age? When I talk to the layperson in the street, he or she says the worst of this is that they are moving the residents from a centre because of compliancy issues but they are putting them into other centres that are less compliant than the one they are in. It is like saying we will take them out of the hotel room and put them into the mobile home. I ask Mr. Fitzgerald to explain how that is rights-based best decision-making and a rights-based place to put people, and how it will be for their betterment. I cannot understand how that can be.

I thank the Chair. I know there is a lot in that.