Mary Butler (Waterford, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The system is far from broken. Today, as we stand here in Leinster House 56,000 people have received home care and will receive it at lunchtime and in the evening. We are challenged in areas where we do not have staff. I had a budget of €723 million this year, a phenomenal amount of money, to deliver home care. We are challenged from the perspective that approximately 3,000 people are waiting for home care. They are funded, but we cannot get the carers.

The second issue is that about 3,200 people have a partial package. They may not get supports at weekend. I put in place a strategic workforce advisory group last year to examine how we could make these changes. I worked closely with the former Minister of State, Deputy Damien English, on making sure that we could introduce permits for those who are living outside of the EU. To date, of the permits issued on 1 January, 68 have issued. We are also running a rolling recruitment campaign across all nine CHOs. The main reason why more private capacity is being used is because we have increased the level of home care to people by over 3 million hours since the Government came into office. When there is more demand, we have to go to where there is someone to provide the supports.

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