Noel Grealish (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank my colleague for bringing this motion before the House. It is a wonderful thing that, with the advances in medicine and in our general health, people are living longer, more fulfilling lives. The number of people in Ireland aged over 65 is soaring. It has jumped by almost a fifth in the space of just five years according to the 2016 census. The population of those aged over 80 has doubled over the past quarter of a century alone. Thankfully the majority of them are still living at home. More than 40% are living alone. Current projections indicate that by the middle of this century the number of people aged 80 and over will be pushing the 500,000 mark. We need to do more to ensure that these older people can stay out of long-stay residential care for as long as possible. This motion seeks to put home care on a more solid footing. It also makes solid economic sense to the country as a whole. The cost of helping people to live largely independent and happy lives within their own communities is a fraction of what it costs to keep them in a nursing home or hospital.

Of course, any discussion of the future of home care services for older people must include a serious look at the situation regarding day care centres. These centres play a vital role in the efforts to enable an older person to remain in his or her own home for as long as possible. They offer not only services for the physical welfare of the older person, but also a most important social outlet for people whose only other contact from day to day is probably the postman. We need to look at funding for these centres and ensure that it is adequate to allow them to continue the good work they do in supporting older people in local communities.

The cost to the HSE of a person attending one of these day care centres is an average of €66 per week according to a reply I recently received from the HSE in response to a parliamentary question I tabled on the issue. The equivalent cost to look after the same person in a nursing home is more than €800 a week on average, and a lot more in many cases, particularly in Dublin. It is therefore clear that any investment in day centres is a most cost-effective way to help our older people continue to live independent healthy lives in their own homes and their own communities.

Many of these centres are facing an uphill struggle to maintain their services at the level they wish to. In my own county of Galway there is a wonderful day care centre in the village of Claregalway. It is open five days a week from 9.30 a.m. to 5 p.m. It was opened more than five years ago after a group of local people came together with the aim of providing the facility for the village and the wider community. It is a place where older people can visit, enjoy social interaction and take part in various activities and educational programmes to enable them to continue living independently. The centre also provides a day respite service for carers of people suffering from long-term illness. Various activities and educational programmes are provided which are specifically designed for the elderly community to keep them up to date on what is going on around them.

On that issue, I have visited the day care centre and what I have found and what I have been told more and more over the last number of months and years is that the HSE is actually telling people to attend it. It is cheaper to tell the family to put their elderly family members into the day care centre than to put them into nursing homes. The HSE is actually using the day care centres as nursing homes and it is not giving any money to the day care centres to provide that service. That is an absolute scandal. It is going on around the country. Health care workers are doing that.

It is the same thing with Cuan Mhuire. Cuan Mhuire is an excellent facility run by Sr. Consilio Fitzgerald which provides services for people who have drink problems. If a person goes into a hospital with a drink problem, the hospital will pay for a taxi to drop him or her out to Cuan Mhuire. The hospital will tell Sr. Consilio that the person is now her problem and no longer that of the hospital. That is what is going on out there. That has to be addressed urgently.

The centre in Claregalway is supported by fully qualified staff and care assistants. A wheelchair accessible bus service is available to bring people to and from the centre. While the Claregalway and District Day Care Centre gets funding from the HSE, it is barely enough to pay to provide even one month's service in the year.

I will finish on this point. Planning permission has been received for a new day care centre and an early retirement village in Claregalway. A local farmer gave the land free of charge to build this new day care centre and nine or ten independent living units. Fair play to the Department of Communications, Climate Action and Environment. It is providing the funding to build the independent units. Nobody wants to give funding towards the building of the day care centre however. I ask the Minister of State to look into that and see if any funding to open that facility can be provided by the State.

See this speech in context