Duncan Smith (Dublin Fingal, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Cullinane for this excellent motion. A few weeks ago I was going door-to-door and came across a woman who had just come home and was getting out of her car in her driveway and was taking a moment to compose herself. I had that feeling with which we are all familiar of trying to deliver a leaflet and wondering what to do. She took the leaflet, called me back and asked me to come in. She had come from providing a couple of hours care for her mother - she shares the care with two sisters. Like many people providing care, she finds it a struggle and it is difficult. Her mother has been approved for home help hours, an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening every day. She had been waiting for the service for nine months. I rang around to see why she had been waiting and I found out from one of the providers, which was very helpful, that there were specific times on the request, which is a perfectly understandable request for a family member filling out a form for home help to make. A person who needs home help may need medication at 8 a.m., 9 a.m. or 10 a.m or whatever the case may be. The hours on the form were deemed antisocial off-peak hours. They were not. The hours requested were not 10 a.m. or 6 p.m.; rather, they were specific hours such as 9 a.m. and 5.30 p.m.

When I advised the woman that was the case she told me if she had known that she would not have put times on the application because they could be flexible. She had to go through the process again. If I had not met her, made calls and spoken to a helpful person from a private home care provider who gave me that insight the woman would still be scrambling with the forms on her kitchen table, which she showed me, making phone call after phone call and desperately trying to seek home care for her mother and respite for her and her sisters. That is just one of many examples of how the system as it exists is failing so many people.

The recommendations of the workforce advisory group included a national campaign to raise the profile of home care, promote training opportunities and a national and EU campaign on the benefits of working in the sector. The recommendations mean naught unless recommendations 5 and 6 are implemented.

Recommendation 6, on the living wage, to which the Minister of State referred, is weak. We need an ERO similar to what we have in childcare. We need a collective agreement that will set a wage living wage or above for workers in the industry and include travel, which was another recommendation. The principle of the recommendations is not bad, but the language, in particular on an hourly rate, is weak. I would rather a stronger trade union language, using the model we have in childcare, and getting the industry and stakeholders to agree a rate, through the JLCs. Only then will advertising and recruitment campaigns work in respect of care.

This is not a new or novel issue we are discussing. We all have long experience of dealing with families who wish to avail of home care for their loved ones and workers who are burned out, overstretched and are being paid for one hour rather than two hours' work because they have to travel between locations.

We now have micro-geographic areas through which a home care worker is willing or able to work. Sometimes only half of an area such as Kinsealy, in north county Dublin, is covered because the other half is too far away from workers. It is nowhere near the largest town in north County Dublin. These are the failures.

I want to hammer home that inviting private companies to pay a living wage is not strong enough. We need an ERO. The handful of groups that made submissions on this report included the Irish Congress of Trade Union and SIPTU. The trade unions are engaged and want to be part of the solution. If we set wages appropriately, people will work as home care workers because it is vocational and care work, which people want to do. However, they want recognition not only in their pay but in the esteem in which they are held in the State.

A couple of hours ago I met contract cleaners and security workers who are still awaiting their Covid recognition payment.

Those workers did not mention the amount, the cost-of-living crisis or any of that, as would have been understandable and their right. They just mentioned recognition. It is the same with home care workers. I ask that the Minister of State re-engage with the trade unions and set about a process through which-----

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