Tom Clonan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank all the witnesses for being here, especially Ms O'Toole and Mr. Brown. I congratulate Mr. Brown. I was a primary school teacher in a previous life, when I was 20 back in 1987. I started teaching that year. Back then, the World Bank was going to foreclose on Ireland's national debt. We had a Taoiseach, Charlie Haughey, who told us we were living beyond our means. Basically, as a country, we did not have a pot to urinate in. We did not, however, have children asleep in the classroom because they were living in family hubs, homeless or living in hotels. Even though we were in such a parlous state, we were building houses. We did not have the level of homelessness, poverty and inequality we have now.

I was struck listening to all the witnesses, because my journey into this building and this committee room has come through our experience as a family of having a child and now an adult with additional needs in this country. In the past 15 years, things have deteriorated terribly. Mr. Nolan said there has been no progress in social care in past 16 years and that, in fact, things might be going backwards. Well, in the disability sector, the system has absolutely collapsed. It has failed. We had Paul Reid in here only a few weeks ago. I asked if we could have the intellectual honesty we had with the financial crash, when it was accepted we needed to be bailed out.

Therefore, I feel like I am sending the witnesses a postcard from the future regarding all the issues they highlighted. In our case, there are no physiotherapists and no physiotherapy. There are no speech and language therapists to meet children's needs. They are being failed. There is no early intervention. Childhoods are lost. Every measure in our sector is failing. There are suboptimal outcomes, including isolation, poverty, homelessness and suboptimal medical outcomes. We are actually inflicting harm on tens of thousands of children. This is the direction in which the witnesses' social care sector is heading. It is not possible to recruit or retain social workers for the same reason we cannot keep our nurses, speech and language therapists and occupational therapists.

Therefore, we have had a State, or rather a polity, that for the past 20 years has not valued care or caring. It does not value these endeavours. It places very little value on these types of activities. I did the mathematics on my phone here. If it does cost €6,000 a week to keep one person in residential care, then that amounts to €2 billion annually. We have had 20 years of a neoliberal agenda that reifies the private sector, the commodification of care and its subcontracting. It is an approach that has failed completely. I never know from one day to the next whether somebody is going to come for my son. It means we are robbed of all the normal anticipation of going to college. That is replaced with precarity and fear etc. I refer to the point Senator Ruane highlighted earlier in respect of reinforcing, corroborating and extending all the correlated causalities of poverty and people going into homelessness, care and crisis. Unfortunately, this winter, and in future, we are going to see much more of this.

I have two questions for the witnesses and one observation. The first question concerns the fact I certainly noticed a very rapid deterioration in the global sets of measurements for disability services with the onset of the economic crash and the subsequent austerity. Imposing cuts on the most vulnerable in society was seen as a virtue. Pain and suffering were imposed on the weakest and the most vulnerable people, and that has been our lived experience. I can trace this process back to the crash and when we bailed out the banks and socialised their debts. That was the point when things got tough for us, and they have now become impossible. Will the witnesses similarly trace back a deterioration in the social care system to that point as well?

My second question concerns that fact that, despite all the virtue signalling and expressions of empathy and sympathy, I feel we do not have a Government that really wants to get to grips with this situation. I have some ideas in this regard. I think we need to have legislation that forces the provision of social care. I refer to legislation that legally obliges the State to provide services and care. My understanding as a layperson is that Ireland is an outlier in that we do not have a set of social care and well-being laws, as is the case in England, Wales, Northern Ireland, Scotland, France, Germany and every other country in the EU. We do not have that. As far as I am aware, we are the only country in the EU that provides care and services on a kind of grace and favour basis. It is not possible to demand these services. The HSE cannot be legally obliged to provide services or, I imagine, Tusla or any other organisation. These are provided based on grace and favour. Do the witnesses think it would be helpful if I were to get my colleagues to assist me in working to draft this type of legislation? It would be based on the best templates in Germany and elsewhere. Those are my two questions.

My observation is that we need change politically in respect of what we value. The focus for the past 30 years has been on neoliberal ideas of fixing the economy and of doing so being so important. We need to fix our society. We had intellectual and ethical failures in the Celtic tiger years that have not been addressed. All I would say to Sinn Féin and Mary Lou McDonald is, "No pressure."

This is what we need. I refer to people like Ms O'Toole and Mr. Brown. We have heard hundreds of therapists telling the same story over and over. Ms O'Toole and Mr. Brown have had their past and their development contaminated by this situation. Equally, however, their future has also been affected. I do not know if they can have the modest ambition to have a roof over their heads and to make whatever life decisions they wish to. In that context, who can foster children in that environment? It is a functional prerequisite of human life to have shelter and support. These are listed in the UN charter of fundamental human rights. We do not have them in Ireland anymore. By definition, therefore, this makes us a dysfunctional society and the focus needs to move from the economy to society. Can the witnesses trace a deterioration in social care and, if so, to what point do they trace it back? I certainly can in our lived experience. Do the witnesses believe we need a social care Act and another Act to oblige and legally require the State to provide therapies and services for our most vulnerable citizens?