Paul Donnelly (Dublin West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I also thank the Labour Party for bringing forward this motion. I thank all the workers who are going into people's homes as we speak and providing incredible support to those who need that help. I know that from personal experience. I talked to such a worker in my mother's home yesterday morning. She was coming into the house to help my mother. The work they do is absolutely incredible and we need to support them as much as we possibly can. It is clear, however, that the Government is, unfortunately, not dealing with this issue in the correct way.

The current situation is that some 60% of people are being provided care by private, for-profit companies. I have personal experience in this area because I used to work for Tusla, which used to directly employ family support workers. At one stage, up to 47 family support workers were employed directly in the area in which I worked. They were employed directly by the HSE before responsibility broke off to Tusla. Somewhere in the region of five are now left. There are only five directly employed family support workers. That support is now provided by some not-for-profit and some for-profit organisations. The money for family support is going out from that service. I am absolutely not disparaging the work that people do in the not-for-profit or for-profit organisations. I do not think anyone would do that. It is the same people doing the same work. However, at the same time, we need the State to provide a service so that we can have control, a say and an input to the service that is being provided for people.

I read a report the other day which showed that nearly 3 million hours of home care promised by the HSE could not be provided last year due to a shortage of staff. Although we set a target of 23.67 million hours, only 20.79 million were provided, despite the presence of more than 6,000 people on the waiting list.

The Minister of State is genuine and her heart is in the right place. However, the Government has failed to provide healthcare. We are talking about older people who may be in hospital and cannot get home. That is devastating for those people. They do not want to be in nursing homes. Some people do want to be in homes and love it there. However, there are others, such as my mother, who want to be at home. When people go into hospital, the care package moves off and it is sometimes a struggle to get the workers back in to cater for the person who wants to, and can, live at home. We want to get them back home. We need to do our best. The money needs to be provided. The employment opportunities need to be provided.

Over the summer, I was inundated with contacts from people who are looking to work in home care and nursing in this country. The situation has improved but some of the barriers we hit while trying to deal with the Department were incredible. There are very simple things that could be done. For example, somebody could look at the documentation coming in at the very beginning and could run through a checklist to see if all the necessary documentation has been provided. In many cases, people are delayed because one piece of documentation is missing from their applications. They are left waiting for weeks and weeks before they know that. It could be months before they are told they need to reapply because a certain piece of documentation is required. That is something simple that could be done. When the documentation comes in from people who are coming in and want to work - and we are looking for such people to come here - we could have a checklist at the beginning to tell those applicants that a piece of documentation is missing. We can tell them to go off and get the relevant documentation and come back to us. That will stop an awful lot of the delays for people who are trying to come into the country. I will come back to the Minister of State on that point. I will email her.

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