Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)

I commend all the home carers and the people who are providing a great service.

We need to have some truth around this situation because the Minister of State knows, going back to 2007 and 2008, we had an excellent home care service in this country. The HSE and the Minister for Health at the time went around and they chopped and chopped and privatised the service. They privatised home care, which is such a vital service. This was wrong. I have a file that thick at home since we worked at it in Mayo, because they started implementing the cuts on home care in the county. This is not the right way to provide home care.

I commend and thank those who brought forward this motion. This situation need never have happened. It has been constructed by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael together and that is the honesty around it. The HSE has confirmed that currently 242 people in Mayo are on the waiting list for home support. That is not right. That is home support they vitally need. A spokesperson for HSE West and North-West said that home support is provided to a total of 1,581 clients in Mayo. We cannot operate a health service without a proper home care system and despite the great work that is being done by home carers, we do not have that because staff cannot be retained.

The deal some of these staff get, in terms of the money they are paid or the lack of travel allowance they get, is not right. That is why there are problems with retention and recruitment. This situation has to be fixed because it obviously has a knock-on impact on people who are in acute hospitals longer than they need to, but also on other situations in other hospitals as well. There is a way to fix this, and we have presented to the Government time and time again how this situation can be fixed. I urge the Minister of State to listen.

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