Ivana Bacik (Dublin Bay South, Labour)

It is 20 years since we saw distressing footage of conditions at Leas Cross nursing home. Here we are again. The scenes on last Thursday's "RTÉ Investigates" programme were deeply disturbing. Aoife Hegarty's team exposed horrifying practices in nursing homes run by one of Ireland's largest private care providers. I commend the RTÉ team and the whistleblower, Claire Doyle, on exposing those abuses. We saw awful footage of older people being pushed around, forgotten, abandoned and calling for help from their beds or after a fall. Often, residents were left to soil themselves and there were shortages of basic equipment like hoists, sanitary wipes and gloves. We saw staff making makeshift bedsheets out of incontinence pads.

Older people are being demeaned, degraded and dehumanised in some private nursing homes, and profiteering is at the root of this. Some 80% of Irish nursing homes are private or voluntary and shockingly, just ten investment funds own one third of all nursing home beds in the system. An influx of investment funds in recent years has left our country with the most privatised system of care in the EU. Big corporations are profiteering from, in some cases, negligent care of older people who are mistreated in private homes, so that companies can make a quick buck.

The residents of Leas Cross, of Beneavin Manor and of many so-called care facilities have, over the years, paid a high price for State tolerance of an unacceptable status quo. If we are honest, can we truly say we are shocked? I acknowledge some things have changed since Leas Cross. HIQA was set up to set the standards, to inspect and, indeed, to shut down non-compliant nursing homes, public and private. What we know now is that HIQA is clearly failing in this duty.

When families are reviewing a particular nursing home for their loved ones, the first thing they do is check the HIQA report. That is what the family of Audeon Guy did. Families, in relying on information from HIQA, may unwittingly be putting their relatives in harms way. Clearly HIQA practice is unfit for purpose and must be reviewed urgently. The Minister for Health needs to explain why it is HIQA that is now being called upon to conduct the so-called independent review of all nursing homes. That is particularly strange after it glaringly failed to identify abusive practices at Beneavin that some journalists and a carer with a camera found.

This was not an isolated incident. We are all hearing this. I am aware of one nursing home employee who has not received so much as an acknowledgment of her complaint to HIQA, five months after she submitted the complaint. Another person who contacted me was told by HIQA that it would not investigate the care received by her now-deceased mother and the ombudsman would not investigate. It was a substantial complaint. Among other things, there was an unforgivable failure to provide her mother with necessity medications.

We need to urgently review the system. Has the Taoiseach confidence in HIQA's ability to review nursing home care in Ireland and how can families have any level of trust in HIQA reports having seen what we saw last week?

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