Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I wish to share time with Deputies Fitzmaurice, Wallace and Tom Fleming.

As the Minister, Deputy Varadkar, is aware, ALONE has stated the waiting list for nursing home places is spiralling out of control. Those are pretty dramatic comments. The waiting lists are completely unacceptable for elderly people who are trying to get into nursing home care. I am aware from anecdotal evidence that the bureaucracy is extremely difficult to navigate and it takes a long time for people to even get through this fair deal scheme. The Minister himself has acknowledged the fundamental problem is that the budgets are capped and this is the reason for these unacceptable waiting lists. I do not lay responsibility simply at the present Administration's door but I draw an analogy with the housing crisis, which is similar. It is almost exactly the same except for the older population in need of nursing home care. Once upon a time, there was adequate public provision of housing and of nursing home care. It was perceived to be the responsibility of the State to provide both of these things directly. In recent years, there has been a creeping privatisation of both these areas, that is, the areas of housing and nursing home care. This has led to an increasing reliance on the private sector and on a model of funding such care through the fair deal scheme, in which people pay for these things out of their own assets, that is, out of their own houses or incomes, rather than funding them through central taxation in a progressive way. Essentially, the chickens are coming home to roost in this regard, just as they have with the housing crisis. The private sector cannot deliver and a two-tier system is developing. The answer to this crisis is that direct public investment in public nursing home care is needed, rather than a model that is failing in depending on the private sector.

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