Thomas Gould (Cork North-Central, Sinn Fein)

In recent years, I have had the privilege to work with Pat Coyle and the Care Champions, a group that came into existence because of what happened to their loved ones during the Covid pandemic and how badly they were treated. Their stories are heartbreaking. I have witnessed the guilt and the hurt they feel because of the way their loved ones were treated. They feel their loved ones were abandoned. Care Champions and Pat Coyle have tried to engage with the Government in a constructive manner. They are not about pointing fingers of blame. They want to ensure that what happened to their loved ones will never happen to anyone again. They want to be positive and constructive, not negative.

The Care Champions just want to work the Government and the Opposition so that people in nursing homes or hospitals, vulnerable older people and vulnerable sick or disabled people are not let down the way they were let down. To listen to their stories and hear how they feel about what happened to their families was just heartbreaking. They have made freedom of information requests, they have looked for meetings, and they have looked for the Government to implement the changes that were supposed to come about after what happened during the Covid-19 crisis. This has not happened. The Government is now talking about an inquiry. There will have to be a proper, full, open and honest inquiry, not an inquiry that is going to pay people, but an inquiry to get to the facts of what happened so that these people can have their stories and voices heard.

The "RTÉ Investigates" programme was horrendous. Care Champions told us the organisation is not surprised but, based on what it has found out in its own investigations, it is surprised that other people are surprised. The scenes in the programme were absolutely disgusting. Some 200 complaints were made against one nursing home, yet it took RTÉ to highlight the issue, and fair play to it. RTÉ can be criticised at times, sometimes rightly, but in this case its journalists did really important work to try to protect vulnerable older people when the State and HIQA were letting them down. Action needs to be taken.

How many other nursing homes are operating in the same manner? One of the hardest decisions a person or family can ever make is to put someone into a nursing home. Recently, a member of my family who is sick had to go into a nursing home while recovering. We could only visit between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. That is no good for anyone who is working. I am lucky we have a good family and people are flexible and able to manage things. In the hospital, we were only allowed visits from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., so there were no visits during the day. We should encourage more people to visit vulnerable people, not reduce access to them.

All of this is coming about because of a privatisation agenda that Fine Gael, supported by Fianna Fáil, has driven for decades. We see money and profit being put before people. How can that be right?

A nursing home owned by the State, Heather House at St. Mary's health campus in Gurranabraher, had a brand new dementia unit built and it has been lying empty for over a year because of a lack of resources and staff. At a time when people are crying out for dementia places in nursing homes the Heather House dementia unit is lying idle. The Minister of State needs to act on that.

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