Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Harty and all the other people who helped with this, as well as my colleagues, Deputies Michael and Danny Healy-Rae, Noel Grealish and Michael Collins, for their input and their contributions. I also thank all the other Deputies who spoke on the motion. I must lament that the Labour Party Members are as láthair arís, as are some of our friends in the Social Democrats and the Green Party. The Labour Party has abandoned the people of rural Ireland. Last week I said cad a dhéanfaimid feasta gan adhmad, but cad a dhéanfaimid feasta gan Páirtí an Lucht Oibre? One Deputy in my constituency is blowing every day about what he is doing for the people. It is all blunderbuss and he is firing blanks. I refer to Deputy Alan Kelly. He is not here.

The Minister of State gives us thanks, but we do not want thanks. The carers do not want thanks either. They want solace, support and to be heard. Deputy Butler was talking to the Minister of State, Deputy Daly, today. A simple solution is to ask for a seven-day weekly rotation in the HSE home help service. That would solve the issue of the weekends. It should not be rocket science. At the weekends and at times such as Christmas there is nobody, and that is not good enough. This motion was tabled in an effort to coerce the Government to act on this.

We tabled a motion over a year ago, in November 2016, regarding the fair deal and the unfair deal that farmers and the self-employed are getting. Tá an tAire from west Cork imithe anois but he is due to meet Maura Canning and her group from the wonderful committee in the IFA tomorrow. I hope he has good news for them because he has met them several times. He tells them that he is waiting to hear from the Attorney General. When we seek to cut something we do not have to consult the Attorney General. However, when we have cut something and we wish to reintroduce it we must consult the team in the Office of the Attorney General. That is the case with the motorised transport grant that was cut five years ago. When Deputy Finian the hero McGrath was on this side of the House he was a great man, but he is doing sweet bugger all to reintroduce that. We are also waiting for the HSE. It is a total mockery and shenanigans of the highest order. The people can see through that.

There are 55,000 people with dementia in this country. There are 129 home care packages for that number of people. It is an absolute insult. We know what we are waiting for in respect of the fair deal. The Carers Association and many other groups are doing Trojan work, yet we make them pay VAT on any equipment they buy. A commitment in the budget to return the VAT was strongly sought by our group in the talks on forming a Government. This is money from people's pockets on which they have already paid their tax. They give it voluntarily so we should not even dream of having VAT on those items.

There are 70,000 people seeking a home care package and 50,000 have been left without one. Any modern, self-respecting democracy would not allow this to continue. The budget for the HSE has grown to €16 billion this year and I am sure it will be well over that in next year's budget, but we get fewer outcomes and less ordinary service. The people we are discussing are the people who worked hard and tirelessly to educate their families and to do everything else over the decades. Now they are in ill health. That might be only around the corner for some of us. It could happen any day. We do not know. We are all approaching that era. There are also young people who are sick for different reasons. However, we cannot assist the enablers who do this work. Instead, we persecute them.

On the other hand, private agencies have been established. Somebody said that there are up to 50 private agencies. I did not think there were so many, but it is a large number. Many of them have been set up by former and retired HSE officials, which is a scandal. There should be a moratorium whereby when people leave the HSE or the public service, they cannot set up private businesses on the following day or have the business established before they leave. That is morally and financially bereft of decency and it must be stopped. It is happening in the planning area as well, whereby people are consultants before they leave and retire. We must break that cycle and the grip they have on the handlebars of power in this country. It is not allowing ordinary people to give solace and support to their families with a modicum of dignity.

They can see the money they can charge in this area from within the HSE. They can see there is manna from heaven if they set up such a company when they retire with their package. Home helps are paid €11 per hour at best. It could be €9 or €10 per hour for a few miserly hours. They might only be given 40 minutes and some have been cut down to 30 minutes. They would only have arrived in the house. These are not clinical people who just wish to get in and out. These people are interested and passionate. They have made a career of caring for people. They wish to come into the house, meet and greet, light the fire, cook the breakfast and do whatever necessary, delicate work is required, which many of us would not like to think about, with the patient or the people for whom they are caring. It is valuable work. We are continually cutting their hours and giving them so few hours that they are going around in a spin. We pay them €9 or €10 per hour, yet we pay up to €25 per hour to the private companies which, in turn, only pay up to a maximum of €11 per hour to their employees. Who is getting the rest? I am not a mathematician but I do not need to be to calculate that. It is going into the pockets of the many people who set up companies and who worked in the HSE. They failed the country when they were in the HSE and did not deliver. They were not public servants. Some of them have become self-serving.

There are many good officials and workers.

In particular, I salute the people on the ground, who include the community welfare officers and district nurses, but they are so busy with paperwork and regulations, of which we got more today from the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, that they barely have time to see patients because they are writing report after report. I salute all those people and the managers of the home help service who do their best to distribute the little they have.

I will provide some figures relating to carers. Family carers in Ireland provide more than six million hours of unpaid care every week, saving the State approximately €4 billion annually according to the charity Family Carers Ireland. In an articleinIrishHealth.com, Deborah Condon stated:

According to the charity, almost 200,000 family carers in Ireland provide 6,287,510 hours of unpaid care every week, ‘yet despite the enormity of this contribution, family carers are struggling'. It noted that since 2009, there has been a €2.7 billion cut in health and social care spending and this has led to a reduction in vital services, such as respite, home care and residential services.

The article went to state:

"Their work saves the State €4 billion each year. Despite this contribution, many carers find it more and more difficult to get respite and access services. Isolation, financial hardship, depression, stress, poor health and exclusion from paid work remain hallmarks of many carers' lives," explained Catherine Cox of Family Carers. She insisted that because of Ireland's ageing population, care in the home 'is one of the biggest health service issues facing the incoming government'. "We are asking politicians to commit to investing in and implementing real supports for family carers that fit with the realities of caring in Ireland today," she said.

This is the reality. We paid much homage to the carers' strategy for years. Another report is gathering dust, which is totally unacceptable. The Tipperary branch of Family Carers Ireland found that carers provide a staggering 256,120 hours of care per week. This breaks down to an average of 42.1 hours per carer per week. These statistics, which have been provided by the CSO, not the carers, serve only to confirm the heroic efforts that are being made each and every day of the week by the carers of County Tipperary. The findings also record that 7,041 people stated that they provided regular unpaid personal help for a friend or family member with a long-term illness, health problem or disability and that this comprised 4.4% of the county's population in April 2016. Of the carers in the county, 4,225, or 60%, were female while 2,816, or 40%, were male. What is deeply concerning, however, is the finding that there were 138 carers aged under 15 years. This demands immediate examination.

The Minister of State has accepted the motion. This is not good enough for us in the Rural Independent Group. We want this implemented. We are not going to wait like we waited since last November for the fair deal package. We want it done now. We will hold a press conference tomorrow on the plinth of Leinster House to announce this to fight for this vital support and some modicum of decency for these people in their homes. They are Trojan people.

I want to mention day care centres, of which there are many across my county from Carrick-on-Suir to Clonmel to Fethard to Cahir, Cashel and Tipperary town, Nenagh, Templemore and Thurles. The Government tried to screw them in the budget regarding VRT and the VAT they get back on their buses, buses which they need. The Government wants everyone to be out on a limb. The Government is made up of a callous and cold crowd. It should get the HSE by the scruff - the CEO, Tony O'Brien, and others - and bring them in to hold them to account. They are not serving the people. They are not looking after the ordinary people who need services. The Taoiseach had the cheek this morning to say that GPs should keep two patients a week out of accident and emergency departments. What is he going to do? They have no care at home. If we looked after them at home and enabled them to be kept at home, the accident and emergency departments would not be half as busy. There are more than 560 people on trolleys. Is that a modern Ireland for which the people of 1916 fought. I am almost finished and I appreciate the Ceann Comhairle's forbearance. Some of the other Deputies did not even bother to turn up to debate this. It is a very serious issue and those of us in the Rural Independent Group will not sit idly by and allow this to continue because it is outrageous and despicable. It is the worst treatment that sick people, young and old, get. Deputies Michael Collins and Michael Healy Rae have to organise buses to Belfast to get operations to stop people going blind. Where is the Government's moral compass? It is lost in the sheets of paper files and the baggage in government. I hope the Government finds its compass, or someone needs to use a compass, to look after the people whom the Government was elected to look after.

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