Mr. Se?n Moynihan:

For us, day centres are part of the infrastructure and the choice for older people to create places where we can have social connection. At one stage we were in discussions where in one part of the country, the HSE was asking us to take over five different day centres. It is not our area of expertise and we discovered that they were all run very differently and not on the basis of a programme. There can be a situation where older people create the connection and create and drive some of their own activities. At the same time, for mental health, we can identify people who may have loneliness or social anxiety and we can intervene. For those who may have lost physical capacity, we can run the type of social and physical activities to keep people helped and well. We understand the HSE has a plan to try to reopen 95% of centres this year. We realise several are closed because of building works and Covid protocols. We would like to see them all reopen but we would also like to see ongoing commitment to them and ongoing development of what they can actually do because it creates an engagement where we can do so much more than a situation where people just pop down for a few hours. We can meet multiple needs and really get into prevention, especially around mental health.

My colleague from Sage, Mr. Taylor, spoke about funding things slightly differently. Things such as social enterprise are an interesting concept that should be explored and expanded more. It could be the housing with support that we talked about earlier which could be run as a social enterprise. It would also mean that older people feel they are entitled to a service rather than relying on an NGO. We use NGO rather than charity because we do not want any older person to feel that with all the contribution they have given to the community, that just because they ended up in loneliness or poor housing or financial conditions that they are relying on charity. We very much like to see ourselves as a service and we think that is the kind of philosophy that social enterprise promotes.