Verona Murphy (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for his reply but I have to say it is more spin. This Government is going to spin itself out of existence. There is not a word about delivery in his reply. He talked about challenges. The challenge here seems to be to rein in the HSE in some shape or form such that money can be spent where it is required. We cannot accept that €81 million just got thrown into the atmosphere without any cognisance of what that means for people's health.

It means we do not recruit healthcare workers and pay them appropriately in order that they are enticed into the sector. I cannot have Departments deciding whether a 73-year-old man who ends up paraplegic as a result of an accident is an older person or a disability case, because that is what happened when I wrote to the Department. One came back and said it was not it, it was the other Department. That took another week, just for issues like that to be ascertained. It is outrageous. I am sorry to be going off on one here, but this is deeply frustrating for families in very vulnerable positions. Let us imagine the trauma of having one's 73-year-old husband and a father turned into a paraplegic as a result of an accident and not being able to come home from hospital for the want of two carers coming in for 45 minutes in the morning and for 45 minutes in the evening. Does that sound like too much to ask for a 73-year-old farmer who paid his tax all his life, whose wife wants to be the primary carer, to take him home and deliver the care he deserves? The co-ordinator says there can be one carer for 45 minutes once a day, five days a week, not seven, and they will be left to their own devices for the other two days even though his wife is also 73 years of age. This cannot go on. This is why I am so against what is going on here for the past eight weeks, that we voted on last night. The real work that needs to be done is just going unnoticed.

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