John Gormley (Dublin South East, Green Party)

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this Bill. We are taking it on the advice of the Attorney General and previously we relied on, as the Minister of State mentioned, the 1993 Nursing Home (Subvention) Regulations under section 7 of the Health (Nursing Homes) Act 1990. It is time we revisited this area not only because of the revelation of conditions in Leas Cross, which opened our eyes and the eyes of many people to the terrible conditions in some of our nursing homes and to which I will refer later, but in the broader context of health care because it is clear that how we deal with our ageing population is crucial to the overall maintenance of our health service.

The analysis of consultants who attended a recent meeting of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Health and Children was that while we need extra beds — step-down beds — in the community, they also clearly stated that society has changed in that we now have less time for our children and therefore put them into child care. By the same token, because we are busy and have less time for our ageing population, we put elderly people into nursing homes. Staying at home to care for one's children is a thing of the past. People want to care for their elderly at home and that is an aspiration and an ideal, but it is not possible given the changes in our society. An increasing number of people will enter nursing homes. Statistics reveal that people are living much longer and will spend much longer in nursing homes. That is simply a fact. We have the capability of keeping people alive for much longer.

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