Sandra McLellan (Cork East, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this important and disturbing issue. Let me say at the outset that Sinn Féin is absolutely opposed to any cuts in home care packages or home help hours. Essentially, there are two key aspects of this debate. One is the care of vulnerable people and the other is the underemployment of working class women. With regard to the issue of care, Sinn Féin is of the view that the State should recognise the right of people to live with dignity and independence in their homes and communities for as long as possible. With regard to the issue of underemployment, home helps employed by the HSE are public service employees. Thus the State has an obligation under the terms of the Croke Park agreement not to impose compulsory redundancies or reduce their rates of pay.

Unfortunately, care in the community and the provision of sufficient and decent working hours are outside of and beyond the political imagination of the current Fine Gael-Labour Government. In the neoliberal worldview, which both parties have fully internalised, there is no room for a politics grounded in a sense of fairness, compassion, humanity or social solidarity. Rather, what we have instead is a Government that is prepared to engage in slash and burn-type politics irrespective of the consequences. The fact that Fine Gael and Labour are actively engaged in the dismantling of the welfare state is not a cause of concern for either party but then why should it be? Fine Gael has, after all, since the foundation of the State prioritised the interests of private business and the more affluent sections of the Irish middle class. It follows that in this political pecking order, the poor, the working class and the vulnerable are at the bottom. The Labour Party, on the other hand, claims a more noble history. It is the party of the great socialist and humanitarian James Connolly, a man who was born into terrible poverty, struggled for most of his short life to etch out an existence for his family and had to live with the added burden of disability and ill health.

Given such different beginnings, one wonders how we arrived at the current political juncture whereby a party that has a long history on the right of Irish politics finds itself in power with the party Connolly founded, namely, the Labour Party. Perhaps this is an overly simplistic answer to what is a complex question. Nonetheless, it is my belief that both groupings have been well and truly seduced by the trappings of power and have been rendered all but redundant by their wholehearted embrace of the cruel and ruthless neoliberal economic policies they so vigorously defend week in and week out in the Chamber. Having captured the State, they are now on a home run and have developed the capacity to defend the most heinous of cuts. Hidden in a discourse that prioritises the primacy of the market, their cruelty knows no bounds. Their mission, or so the logic goes, is to save Ireland from itself and in order to do this, the most vulnerable in our society, be they children, the elderly, people with disabilities, the poor or the sick, must be made pay the price for our supposed national rejuvenation which will, or so we are told, come about when the troika decides we have paid our dues to international financiers and capitalist marketeers.

How else are we to make sense of the Minister's turnabout on the issue of home help hours? While in opposition, he criticised the plan of then Minister for Health and Children, Mary Harney, to cut home care hours and restrict time spent on certain tasks, stating, "This draft plan is retrograde and flies in the face of what is clearly value for money". A year later, just months after taking office, the Minister told reporters, "I will be doing everything we can to ensure that, not alone there are no cuts, but we get an increase in home care help hours for people".

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