Danny Healy-Rae (Kerry, Independent)

First, I thank the Labour Party for giving us the opportunity to talk about this important topic.

It is an emotive subject when families have to make the decision to put someone into a nursing home. I vividly remember when my father was not great and a decision had to be made. I am glad we were able to keep him in his own home with Kathleen Fitzgerald. I thank all the people, including Noreen Sullivan, Jackie Ahern and William Leary. I will leave people out and I am sad about that but I thank all the people who helped him in his final days. He died in Tralee hospital and I thank the staff there and the staff in Killarney district hospital for the great attention and care they gave him every hour and day he was there. They are wonderful people and we want to thank them. We will never forget them.

He said a nursing home was kind of a departure lounge and that when people go into one, there is not much hope of coming out again. That was one of the things he felt and said. For many people, when they are not improving, not getting better but getting worse, families have to make the decision. Many people keep their loved ones at home and they should get more help to do so. The Denmark model is that there are hardly any nursing homes in Denmark. We should strive to better our homecare system and it would save us a lot of money.

At present, I am hurt by what we saw on RTÉ. There are a lot of great nursing homes, including family-run nursing homes. We have them in Kenmare, Killarney and other places. We are lucky enough in Kerry that we did not have them, but I worry about the big business companies that own a number of nursing homes. They have a different model. They have to make the thing pay. They are not like Mother Teresa. I worry about the system where public nursing homes are getting more funding than private nursing homes. It costs the same to operate the bed or room. They should get the same funding. There should be no excuse at any time to mistreat or treat badly elderly people. They are the people who got us to where we are today, people who strived day in and day out to rear families, keep employees going, provide homes for their families and so forth. Surely they deserve the Government's best to ensure they are properly looked after by carers and home helps.

There is another dimension that is valuable and is not appreciated enough. It is where people come to sleep with elderly people, not in the beds with them, but in the house to be there for the whole long night and stay until the morning. They should be rewarded better than they are. Families have to pay for that themselves. The State should intervene. We are talking about people who are trying to stay in their homes for as long as possible.

We should strive to develop a system like the model in Denmark, where people are looked after in their homes. We see too often when people are awarded home help - on leaving the hospital, they are told they qualify for home help - that then there is no home help available. The staff are not to be found. That is an awful time for families. The help should be there the minute they land at home or the following days. They should not have to wait. What happens in a lot of cases is that these people have to return to hospital. That is another reason our beds are full in our hospitals. That happens because the home helps are not in place and it is terrible.

One of the reasons I decided to support the Government is that it said it would get rid of the means test. I am looking forward to that and to helping the carers of Ireland, because they are the massive people who do Trojan work-----

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