Michelle Mulherin (Mayo, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this very important motion. I thank the proposers.

How we respect and support our elderly people is the measure of our society and where we are going. They should always be to the fore. We go from childhood to adulthood, obviously, and then become elderly and become in some ways dependent again. These are the people whose shoulders we stand on and who saw hard times that we have no idea about. They kept families together and kept things going when the social welfare State was just a fledgling idea. We owe them a lot of care and support so that they can live with dignity and independence in their own homes. They should be looked after from a health point of view.

One of the biggest challenges as people get older is that they are more liable to suffer from chronic illnesses that will not go away and will require treatment indefinitely. It is important that we have community supports in place whereby they can be cared for in their homes. Both their personal needs and also medical care should be provided for through home help, home care packages, intensive home care packages and community intervention teams.

If people could be provided for in such a way, they would not end up in emergency departments on trolleys, and they would not reach a point where their condition would become acute, such that they would need care in an acute hospital.

We must plan ahead because we are all ageing. In many ways it is a selfish pursuit as we lay the foundations for standards of care that could ultimately benefit us if we stay the course. We must have honest conversations about care of the elderly and how we measure that. Through my constituency office and clinics as families and individuals come to see me, I get a sense of the care people are given. While there are many challenges, many supports are available. I take issue with people peddling the politics of fear to gain political support and momentum. They prey on the fears of the elderly by suggesting they are being forgotten about or that they are not at the heart of what we want to achieve in terms of allowing them to be independent within existing financial constraints. I have had some experiences in that regard in County Mayo, for example, relating to the Sacred Heart Hospital in Castlebar. Many column inches were devoted to its supposed demise and closure due to lack of funding. The speculation continued for months. That did not come to pass but such cases are part of the Opposition’s political arsenal.

My first exposure to such carry-on was shortly after I was elected to this House. A big public rally was staged in my home town of Ballina due to the closure of beds in the district hospital. It was extrapolated that the community nursing home and all other health services would close. It was natural that there were fears because there was a moratorium on recruitment and people were retiring. People were rightly concerned that all the priorities were kept in order as much as possible and that older people would be looked after. It was a shocking display on that occasion. I was new to the job but my sense of it was that there were plans and that the best was being done that could be done. Lo and behold, far from the beds being closed, additional beds have been opened and the hospital is now operating to its full complement. The hospital is a step-down facility for Mayo General Hospital. Ten additional beds were opened recently, which have cleared the trolleys in Mayo General Hospital, for the moment at least, and ten additional new staff are employed full time in the hospital.

See this speech in context