Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Independent) | Oireachtas source

One of the features of this Government has been its habit of redefining language. As words no longer have their intended meaning, people must listen and reinterpret them. Nowhere can this be seen better than in the areas of disability and mental health. The most common phrase the Government uses to describe its ultimate objective is that it will "protect the vulnerable", yet domiciliary care payments have been severely cut.

Home help hours have been cut to the point at which the service has become robotic. How is a vulnerable person who cannot even get out of bed supposed to go to the shops? Ambulance services, the carer's allowance and the chaos around the processing of same are all features of this.

Often, the cut to home help hours does not make sense in a cost-benefit analysis. According to the Centre for Independent Living, CIL, which protested outside Leinster House's gates in August due to cuts in hours, if services were provided directly, they would cost multiples of what is spent on home help.

The cuts to domiciliary care payments started in 2009, predating this Government. However, they have continued. Even children with conditions that will not improve are subject to reviews, which is cynical.

I know of a couple of cases. For example, I have been following a case of a parent who is seeking occupational therapy for a child with autism. The parent was told that the child could not receive it because another support service was providing it. The child has been discharged from the service and will only be provided with it if he or she is an inpatient case. This means that the parent is running around in circles seeking a service that should be available. There should be safeguards to ensure that these services are provided. It is being delivered in a dishonest way.

The ambulance service has been scaled back considerably. I have seen this happen in my area. Transport may only be provided if, in the clinician's view, the patient would be unable to make the journey without clinical assistance or where the patient must be transported on a stretcher. In the past two weeks, I have dealt with a case about which the doctor involved was tearing his hair out. A man aged more than 90 years suffered complications after an operation, but it took a week to get an ambulance to bring him to hospital. If this is the type of service that we are providing to vulnerable people, we need to question what we mean by "vulnerable".

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