Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

We must ask ourselves how we got to a point where we have the highest level of 25- to 29-year-olds being forced to live with their parents. Some 60.9% of that age cohort do not have a place to live independently. That is almost double what it was previously. That is shameful. Over 5,000 leaving certificate students put nursing or midwifery as their first preference on their CAO application. It is not that young people do not want to become nurses and midwives; it is that the State is failing to provide training. We have both the need and the demand for these course places. That is why Sinn Féin would increase the number of places by 250 this year and continue to increase numbers until there are 2,500 new entrants annually. Almost 4,000 students enrol in pre-nursing courses every year with little hope of being able to study nursing at degree level. We are absolutely failing them. If a student enrols in a pre-nursing course, they are interested in nursing and want to be a nurse. There is every chance that they would make an excellent nurse. Yet, we do not give them the opportunities.

I also want to raise the issue of the lack of home care and home care workers. A woman in my constituency, who is an amputee and a wheelchair user, was discharged from a HSE nursing home at the end of November without any care package. Only later was she informed that the home care package had been agreed on paper, but they have no one to cover her area. Since coming home she has had two falls from the wheelchair, one at night, when her wheelchair landed on top of her. Thankfully, she was able to use her panic button. She is now back in hospital again. I am working with other people who are essentially stuck in hospital because they have no home help hours that would allow them to go home. Some have even been charged for the extra time they have had to spend in hospital. I know the staff in the home care units are going above and beyond, but the system is falling apart. The reason it is falling apart is that we have not planned. We have not planned for the labour required. For every little thing that is done at this point, the Government spends more time patting itself on the back than it does sorting out what needs to be sorted.

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