Ms Emily O'Reilly:

When I was Irish Ombudsman, we did a big investigation into nursing homes when the Fair Deal scheme emerged and a lot of private ownership of nursing homes. My own parents were very elderly at the time, and both have died since. Fortunately, neither of them had to experience nursing homes as they both died in a hospice. I remember seeing all these big, shiny nursing homes in fields, away from shops, away from people, away from life. Even if the people in the homes did not have the capacity to live life fully, it is all relative. The idea of "living fully" would mean something different to me than to someone else. I remember being at a conference of nursing home professionals where I referred to it as the warehousing of the elderly, and I was heavily criticised for that statement. I could understand that some people who owned some of those nursing homes were hurt by it because they did genuinely feel they were providing a good service. However, when I read about the care of the elderly in other parts of the world, there is a huge emphasis on keeping them connected to the community. It is not about just putting them out in some field or what the Deputy has described and I do not know the full details of that.