Mr. Seán Moynihan:

That has narrowed over the years. Other Deputies pointed this out. We have strategies around healthy Ireland and it is about health and social care. It seems counterintuitive, whether it is practical tasks, cleaning or access to food, that we would narrow something in such a way as it would damage someone’s health while going in to the help them. It probably comes down to people being under pressure with the time they have to do the tasks they are given. In England, they have a terrible phrase, which I hope we do not fall into, of “care cramming”. Basically, carers come in and they have a certain amount of time and they run in trying to do the basics they can do because they have to run to their next appointment. Part of this, as we pointed out earlier, is that people are getting lower hours than those they applied for and carers have shifted from domestic to personal where they used to do some of the domestic work. People need access to both. The system needs to work from older persons outward. Older people are their own best resource. In the context of an enablement and reablement world, in some ways we are trying to get older people to maintain the skills and capacities they have to continue doing certain things they want. There will be certain tasks that they cannot cope with and that people have to come in to support them around but there should not be a rigid system where someone is given a particular amount of time to do a particular task. That might not be relevant for one person but be perfect for somebody else. When someone comes in, what they provide should be for the person’s health needs and what their clinicians and the people around them assess they need to have provided. The restricted nature of what is involved means that we will have to return to this. History resonates and we go around in circles until we resolve these things.