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

I will be sharing time with Deputy Barry. I thank Sinn Féin for this very important motion on nursing home and elder care. There are obviously viability issues in the nursing home sector and if we had the same speeches 25 years ago, we would be talking about a different composition of nursing home care. At that time in Ireland, it was 80% owned by the public and 20% owned by the private sector. That is now reversed. Whether that is a good or a bad thing is up for negotiation. I would say it is not a good structure as it is one that is largely based on profit. As Deputy Shortall said, 15 huge companies, that have billions in revenue, own 40% of all nursing home private beds. That is almost a monopoly on nursing home care and it is not a good structure. The fair deal scheme is not fit for purpose and it needs to be completely restructured.

We have a different vista now about how our elders want to be treated in later life. Do people want to go to nursing homes? Most people do not; they want to be cared for at home. Sometimes that is not possible but we should put the infrastructure in place if it is possible for people to stay at home because that is where they are happier and more comfortable. In order to do that, the infrastructure has to be put in place.

I refer to an issue around workers' pay, which is crucial to this issue. When we think about it, people who work in that care profession are very undervalued and underpaid. They do the most amazing job in society. They look after our parents, our friends, and people who we love but sometimes they are not recognised and are paid very poorly. It is a reflection on the society we have that the people who give everything and look after our loved ones are not paid properly.

I will touch on the Special Committee on Covid-19 Response.

The committee made a number of important points on the structure of nursing home care and identified serious weaknesses in that structure. It stated, "The State is over reliant on institutional care for our vulnerable population" and that we should move to a publicly-owned and funded model of care, rather than the system we have. Covid showed a huge amount of weaknesses in nursing home care, especially in the private sector. That is not to speak against the people who work in the private sector and the small owners, as they do an amazing job, but there are seriously worrying trends in how this is going. As others said, the small operators that run as family businesses are going to be squeezed and in a couple of years' time, we will not be talking about 20% private but 90% and the 40% private beds will probably be double, given the way things are going. We need to look at things in a different way. We are not going to do it here, but the trend is not going in the right direction.

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