Seán Sherlock (Cork East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

The Labour Party is supporting this Bill and we thank the Minister of State for bringing it forward. It will provide a considerable amount of alleviation for farm families. Who among us has not had a person from a farm family on the telephone telling us about how a loved one is filling out the forms for the nursing home support scheme and expressing deep doubt about the process? Some of that doubt is because it is the end of the road in terms of being able to care for somebody at home. It is often the last resort for a spouse in respect of his or her loved one. It is always with deep reluctance that people agree that it is in a loved one's best interest to go into a residential unit or nursing home.

On top of that is the added pressure of not knowing where people will stand financially as a result of taking that decision to sign up to the nursing home support scheme. People too often tell us of their concern about what the charge will be on their X amount in assets and where will it leave them and their family in terms of their future financial security. There is no question that this Bill goes some way towards addressing this and, for that reason, it must be supported. Who among us has not dealt with a family whose savings, which were built up with bare hands working the land, have been whittled down to nothing? In many cases, people started with nothing or with a very meagre holding and built it up through years and years of hard work, only to find it is to be scattered like grains on infertile ground. Although their loved one is being cared for, there is often nothing left in reserve.

That seems to me to be an awful waste and an awful shame for all those years of work people put into building up these people's holdings. The Bill alleviates that. As I understand it, it does not apply retrospectively, so we spare a thought for the people who have gone through the double hardship of having savings whittled down and having had to make the decision on a loved one's nursing home care.

We have to acknowledge the role of the IFA in this issue. It is interesting to read some of the debates and the submissions that were brought forward by the IFA in respect of the pre-legislative scrutiny in 2019. I note in particular the association's submission through its then president, Mr. Joe Healy, in which he encapsulates the matter very well:

[Significant] uncertainty and anxiety has been created for family farms, with fear that the viability of the farm will be undermined or lost while attempting to meet the costs of care. This has led to the introduction of a three-year cap on farm business assets in circumstances of sudden illness.

It is also important to note that assets transferred for less than five years are included in the assessment of means. As ... [you] can imagine, this has proven to be a barrier to the next generation taking over the family farm due to the debt owing on the farm business asset.

To be fair to the Minister of State and the Government, they have sought to address this imbalance in the system, and that is absolutely to be welcomed.

It is important for us to look as a society at the entirety of care for older people, given our demographics whereby people are living longer than historically was the case. There was a very interesting debate in the Seanad on 10 May, at which the Minister of State may have been in attendance. My colleague, Senator Bacik, participated, stating:

Despite there being half a million carers in Ireland, the issue of care and the immense challenges faced both by carers and the people for whom they care are often neglected. Ireland's population is ageing and people with disabilities comprise a significant portion of the people living in our communities. However, the State remains reluctant to address the fact that most of us will either require care ourselves, or will have to give care to another, and that the infrastructure currently in place is seriously lacking.

She further stated:

[T]he State's default preference for institutional care is archaic and highly problematic. Not to mention that this preference is not in the spirit of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, UNCRPD, which Ireland ratified in 2018, it causes havoc in the real lives of the thousands of people living in this country who cannot do so independently. We have become all too used to hearing horror stories about our broken care model, whether that concerns the scandalous practice of inappropriately housing young people in nursing homes, or the tragic loss of life in institutional care settings that we have seen over the past year due to Covid-19.

Again, to be fair to the Minister, she is seeking in her approach to fix one element of that, and this legislative proposal before us does that. However, we in the Houses of the Oireachtas should have regard to the issue of our ageing population such that we can put in place a housing infrastructure that allows people to downsize and live independently or to create communities across this land that allow people to live independently but in a sheltered environment such that they retain their independence but there are shared services. In the context of today's debates on housing and the motion on waste water treatment services tabled by the Regional Group, I believe strongly that if we are to have serious regard to the fact that we are all ageing and that some of us will be able to live very independent lives until we shake off this mortal coil, even if we will require some level of care, and in the context of the nursing home element of this, with residential care another element of it, where there are levels of dependency from low to high, then a housing mix that allows people to downsize into communities needs to be inculcated into political debate. It needs to be further inculcated into how we devise national planning frameworks in order that we talk not only about younger people getting on the housing ladder but also about how older people will be housed into the future and what our communities will look like in respect of the third or fourth age, when people reach the autumn or the winter of their lives. Nursing homes are a part of that narrative but not the only part. I acknowledge the Minister of State is very conscious of this because she has spoken of this previously. I know she is very cognisant of the need to ensure we start inculcating new language into the debate on care for older people.

As I have said, we in the Labour Party support this legislation. We hope it will bring peace of mind to many farm families. It is important we note again that IFA submission on the pre-legislative scrutiny of the Bill, in which Mr. Joe Healy quoted from the 2018 Teagasc national farm survey, which showed that 30% of farmers were aged 65 years or older while only 7% were under the age of 35. The survey also showed that average farm incomes declined by 21% in 2018, dropping from approximately €30,000 in 2017 to €23,500 in 2018. His submission stated:

This steady erosion of farm incomes threatens both the viability and sustainability of the family farm and the sector's growth prospects. This can be clearly seen in the survey findings with only 34% or 47,000 of farms classified as viable.

We can interrogate those figures more closely, and some will say that the natural result of there not being intergenerational solidarity between fathers and sons or fathers and mothers and daughters going into family farming is that people flee the land, which then allows other people to consolidate farm holdings. What we want to see is a system that ensures that as many people who want to stay on the farm as possible are incentivised to do so. We do not want to see another Mansholt plan, a famous European Commission plan dating back to the 1970s whereby an attempt was made to create massive industrial-type holdings. There needs to be a mix that includes the small, sustainable, intergenerational, father-to-son or father-or-mother-to-daughter farm. I do not mean to be gendered in my language in any way. I do not think people will take me up the wrong way on the point I am making. This mix should allow for the passing of the farm from one generation to another and ensure that no disincentive is put in place. This legislation seeks to provide that type of alleviation at least. It takes out one worry for farmers who find themselves in that unfortunate position whereby a loved one has to go to a nursing home.

We support the legislation. We send our sympathies to people who find themselves faced with very difficult decisions of filling out the form and making the life-changing decision to send a loved one to a nursing home. In dealing with the financial element of this, they are concerned about whether their financial legacy will be whittled down to nothing. We hope this legislation will at least provide some alleviation for them at this time. I am talking about small farmers, people who have built up farm holdings from nothing, from mere blades of grass to fields of green. We must be mindful of those people who are the backbone of the co-operative movement and who continue to be a vital part of our life on this island.

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