Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

These are statements on statutory home care. The problem, as most speakers from the Opposition have made plain, is that we do not have statutory home care. That is the issue. What we have is a system where much of the care is provided by private providers and which is not working very well for most people. I have examples of that the length and breadth of my constituency. I continually have people who have a relative in hospital coming to my office. The relative wants to get home from hospital but cannot do so because a home care package has been put in place but nobody can be recruited to provide it. That is one of the main issues we see.

In the Minister of State's opening remarks she stated that additional money was being put aside for home care and people would get better salaries. One of the issues is that people do not feel they will have the permanency of employment they would have in other sectors. They will not be able to go out and get a mortgage on the strength of being a home care worker. They will not be able to set out a plan for their future on the basis of being a home care worker. That needs to change. It is one of the key things that needs to happen. It can only change if we have a proper statutory home care service which is provided and stood over by the State. That is what the Government does not do and what it seems to be moving away from. At the end of her remarks, she stated there was a lot of disagreement and some people wanted this, some people wanted that and some people wanted the other. We do not care what some people want. What we need is a service that is provided for people. The Government has the responsibility to make up its mind as to what that the service will look like and to deliver that service. We have waited years and years for that service. Coming in here at the eleventh hour, when this Government is near the end of its term, and saying people do not really know what they want is not an answer. That is not appropriate for a Government that has been in office for four and a half years. It simply is not good enough.

I continually come across people who are in very difficult circumstances, who have an elderly relative who has dementia or some other health issue. Indeed, the people advocating on behalf of dementia services were over in Buswells Hotel earlier today. I saw the Minister of State over there. Many of them, when they have issues with home care services, discover that they are getting half an hour three times a day but not at weekends. They need to get some help at the weekends but families are told to hire that in and pay for it themselves. The previous speaker talked about families should not have a burden put on them to pay for it themselves when they pay taxes all their lives, but that is exactly what they are being told to do right now by the HSE providers of home care services. "If you want more hours, go pay for them yourself." That is what they are being told. The service is already there because it has been privatised and a private company is providing that service, so people are told to go to them and hire in the extra hours. That is simply not appropriate either.

We also have a great many people with chronic disabilities. They may not be very elderly, they may be in middle age, they may have multiple sclerosis or various conditions. There are serious problems in trying to get assistance and packages put in place for them. It comes to the same thing, that they cannot recruit staff. That is what we hear all the time from all the providers whether they are in the public or private sector. They cannot recruit staff. They find that one section is stealing the staff of the other. The ones in the private sector sometimes get staff, train them up and have them working for them. Then they are hired by the HSE and the private sector provider cannot get them back. We have this crisscrossing over and back. It is all down to the same problem, namely that we do not have a proper service that is uniform and that we can stand over. The Government has promised a statutory home care service for a very long time.

There has been much mention of nursing homes and the difficulty in keeping people out of them. Absolutely, people should have services provided to them in their homes for as long as possible. I have dealt with many nursing homes. In my experience, the services that are provided in many of our nursing homes are second to none. People are very well looked after. That needs to be said as well. It is not always a bad experience. Often it is a good experience whether the nursing home is public or private. People are often very well looked after. That said, the vast majority of older people do not want to be in a nursing home. They want to be at home. They want to be with their family, with friends coming in to them and they want to have the services to do that. The cost on the State of providing adequate home care services for them to do that is a fraction of the cost of long-term care in a nursing home. We recognise that. Adequate investment at the early stages in the correct service to provide home care will save money for the State in the long term by keeping people out of long-term care in nursing homes.

I also want to mention the women, mainly, who provide home care service and who are the heroes in all of this. They often go far beyond what is required from them and what they are paid for. They get half and hour with somebody and sit for another hour, have a cup of tea and talk to the person and become a friend to them as much as a service provider. They need to be acknowledged, the great work they do. The problem we have here is that we have statements on something the Government has absolutely failed to provide and that is where the Minister of State needs to step up to the mark.

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