Kathleen Lynch (Cork North Central, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I hope it will be done very shortly, as people need to know exactly what the future holds for them. We have 129 public nursing units in the State. Very good research and work have been done in the past two years and we have discovered that we have sufficient beds for now, but I agree that there will come a point when we will not have enough because of our ageing population, which is a Europe-wide problem. We will eventually need additional public and private nursing home beds. We must ensure that when it comes to State-provided care which we must accept is more expensive because of a myriad of elements involved, older people are correctly placed. We know that in the past people were very inappropriately placed and we do not want this to happen again. As we age, we do not want this to happen to us. Work and research have been done and we are very conscious of our future needs.

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