Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

This has been a useful exercise, in that a lot of information has been put out there by the Minister of State and others. Deputy Colm Burke had no difficulty in reeling off a lot of useful figures. Particularly since we entered the Covid period we have been dealing with a lot of disinformation and misinformation. There have been some who will abuse the data and others who fall prey to that. It is something that needs to be dealt with.

There is a lack of statistics and information that needs to be collated on older people. Deputy Cullinane spoke of the need to see the digital transformation. We know the issues about systems in healthcare and the need for proper operating systems for patient information and patient care that allows for best practice and best-case outcomes. We all know the issues in the HSE and the vulnerability to outside attack which we must all be prepared for in this day and age. When we need systems to be interconnected and to communicate to each other we also need to be sure that we have the relevant protections and firewalls and to ensure we can at least mitigate the dangers that exist today.

I will return to an issue I have raised many times, namely, elder care and particularly during Covid. I thought at this stage we would have further information on the inquiry into the State’s reaction to Covid would be and what we would discuss in particular modules. There were several issues with nursing homes. I refer to Dealgan House in Dundalk where 23 families suffered the loss of a loved one during Covid. They have interacted with many Ministers by now and many other politicians across the House to try to get those answers. It will have been three years in November since a small number of the families met the Minister for Health, Deputy Donnelly, to ask him to get answers to their questions. He did say that people required some sort of mechanism or device to provide these answers. These families have been incredibly brave and resilient. Between freedom of information requests and sometimes, when politicians have been helpful, in responses to parliamentary questions, these have provided a huge amount of information but we really need to get down to some form of investigation or inquiry to provide those answers. Those answers are also needed more generally. We constantly talk about best practice and learnings.

We should set in train what is necessary to provide these families with the facts regarding any of the questions that remain concerning nursing homes, the HSE and all others involved. That needs to be done and then we need to make sure there are protocols and best practice for how we go forward regarding elder care in general and also in dealing with the possible pandemics in the future. There are enough dreadful things going on in this world and we do not want to see this beyond that.

I had about 14 different points but they will stay for another day. Regarding the Minister of State's remit, I will address the family addiction support network, which got an element of funding for a specific project through the community innovation funding stream through the Department of Justice. We need to look at what was in the Guerin report around providing the network with the capacity for sustainable funding, rather than living on volunteerism and fundraising, which is not sustainable in the long term.

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