Gino Kenny (Dublin Mid West, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I welcome this motion from Sinn Féin. It is very topical, very well thought out and very relevant to issues around respite. I worked in respite for a long time. It is an essential service for service users and families. It is like a home from home. You build friendships with clients and so forth and you really cannot put a price on that development, that friendship, that care and those surroundings. Respite care is an essential service. At the moment, however, its provision is arbitrary, to say the least. The majority of people who need respite care are not getting it. That is a real shame because when respite care is put in place, it can be hugely beneficial for everybody who needs it. We saw that even today from MS Ireland, and I think the Minister of State was at its facility in Bushy Park. It is an amazing facility but they cannot open it all year round. If they could get a small amount of money - in the greater scheme of things €700,000 is a small amount of money in respect of the health budget - they could open it all year round. That would be amazing because it is an amazing facility and that could be hugely beneficial for those with MS.

I understand that there are issues around retention and recruitment, and there is no getting away from that. I think that is across the board as regards disability services. However, we need to put everything in place to fix that because if we do not do so, we will continuously have this debate on staff and pay and the issues around that.

Again, it is a real shame we are talking about this. We come to debates such as these, and they are worthy, but we should not be talking about this kind of stuff because this stuff should be in action and in place. If it were in place, we would not be talking about it and these services would be given to families who really need them. As I said, my experience of respite care has been that it is an integral part of people's development, and that relationship between the person, the family and the caregivers is an essential part of care. If we are not doing that as a society awash with money, if we cannot do that, there is something fundamentally wrong with our health service.

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