Conor Sheehan (Limerick City, Labour)

My grandad was actually in one of these affected nursing homes in 2024.

The Minister of State, Deputy O'Donnell, would know this nursing home very well. It backs onto our constituency. My grandad was there for over a week when he was discharged from hospital. He said the staff were lovely, and they were, but there were not enough of them evidently. He was often left to go to the toilet on his own. My mum, who is his primary carer, said that when she collected him from the nursing home, the main thing that she took away from it was that he was not washed at all while he was there. He had been there for over a week.

The creeping privatisation of elder care, the warehousing of people and the complete disregard for their basic human rights is one of the worst things that we have done in this country. We have the most private nursing home beds in Europe. In 1990, public nursing homes provided nearly 50% of all beds. By 2023, that had plummeted to 16%.

My sister is a nurse. While in college, she worked in many private nursing homes as a healthcare assistant. I remember vividly - it has never left me - her saying to me once that, during the pandemic, she would not have been shocked if nearly every single patient in a private for-profit nursing home in which she worked had died of Covid-19, such was the shortage of staff and the lack of care. We know the difference a good, well-run public nursing home makes to a community. In our own city, we have the recently redeveloped and enlarged 75-bed St. Camillus's nursing home. This was announced in 2015 by the then Government, representing €450 million of a capital injection into publicly owned nursing homes. Since 2009, we have spent €15 billion subsidising private for-profit nursing homes through the fair deal scheme. Much of that money would have been better spent on investing in building capacity in the public system. Public nursing homes have higher staffing levels and a lower turnover of staff and are generally better run.

I feel that HIQA is failing people here. It is nothing really but a report-writing, box-ticking entity. It is time now for the State to step in and to step up where these private nursing home providers are failing. We need to pass adult safeguarding legislation as a matter of urgency. We have the template. The Law Reform Commission has drafted two Bills. We need to do this before the summer.

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