Gerry Adams (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I begin by commending the thousands of home helps throughout the State, mostly women, who are the essential support for many of our older citizens. Many home helps spend much longer with their clients than the minimum amount dictated by the HSE - and they certainly do not do it for money. Home helps are paid €14 per hour. They have very poor terms and no legal protections. The cost of providing this service through the private sector is €23 per hour and the taxpayer picks up that tab.

I welcome the home helps and their representatives who came here this evening. I believe they represent the true spirit of community and volunteerism because without their very unselfish efforts many of our most vulnerable citizens would fall through the cracks of a system that is deeply flawed. Home helps allow citizens to live with dignity and independence in their own homes and in their own communities. They form a crucial part of a community-based health care system that helps to prevent many citizens unnecessarily spending days, weeks or months in hospital beds.

They are mostly women. Women are compassionate and have the sense that perhaps the male gender does not have. They see the need and they meet it. Often it is an older citizen living alone, in isolation, frail, helpless and lonely. Sometimes it is a couple who have been together for decades. They do not want to be separated and need a home help to avoid having to go into a nursing home. In many cases the home help is the only social contact these folk have. They walk into homes where older citizens are unable to dress, feed themselves, light fires for heating, wash or clean up. They are being told they have to do this in 15 minutes or half an hour. They include citizens such as an 80-year-old partly sighted woman from outside Drogheda who was released from hospital recently after a hip replacement. She has limited mobility and cannot light her fire. Yet she was allocated half an hour of home-help service a week. Shame on the Minister - it is a disgrace.

The Government and the Members opposite appear immune to all of this. Since I came here I have tried to figure this out. Government Members live in these communities and these are their family members and friends. I have still not figured it out. They praise the work of home helps and claim to understand the needs of older citizens, yet they take decisions and support policies, including the Government's amendment to this motion, that devalue the role of home helps, cut back those services, and expose vulnerable citizens to harm. They extol the virtues of care in the community and the work of home helps, yet they strip away the resources needed to make them work. They express concern at the number of older citizens in hospital beds, who should be discharged while they implement policies that stop home care packages and keep older citizens in hospital at greater financial cost. They bemoan the absence of compassion while pursuing a policy of privatisation and profit.

That is the nub of it. The Minister cannot with credibility manage the public nursing home sector while benefiting from the privatisation of nursing home provision and refusing to publicise the criteria by which the Government determines where primary health care centres should be sited.

There are cultures and societies in the world which genuinely care and venerate their older citizens and ancestors. I am firmly of the view that the majority of Irish people share this opinion. This cannot, however, be said of the Government parties. The decision to close 14 long-stay residential care beds and 15 respite beds in the cottage hospital in my constituency is one example of this. The facts are clear: almost one million home help hours will be lost. For the benefit of Deputy Nash, this means that some of the 1,184 citizens in County Louth currently in receipt of home support will lose that support. That is totally unacceptable. It is a sign of the Labour Party's embarrassment on this issue that only one member of that party is in the House for this debate.

I ask all Deputies to support this motion. Anything else is an abdication of our responsibility as Deputies.

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