Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Social Justice Ireland lists the cuts over the last six years that have adversely affected older people. These include cuts to public services, such as home help and community nursing units, reductions in the fuel allowance, abolition of the Christmas bonus, increases in prescription charges, and reductions in the household benefit package. Budget 2014 has now abolished the telephone allowance, has increased prescription charges and has abolished the bereavement grant. Mairead Hayes of the Irish Senior Citizens' Parliament said that the people who need care and need to be enabled and assisted to care for themselves and others were on the receiving end of the toughest measures in budget 2014. Here is one women's story:

My name is Ellen. I was born in a tenement room in Summerhill in Dublin, in 1939. I went to school and grew up and I got a job. I paid all my rates and taxes and I put a few bob by for the future. All of a sudden, the future is here. I am 74 years old. I am on the State pension, but the prices have gone through the roof. I cannot afford to live on them. My savings are almost gone. I am slowly being driven into poverty.

There is something seriously wrong with a society that does not value and respect the people who have lived out the majority of their lives. There is little doubt but that how we care for them and relate to them as older people says a lot about who we are.

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