Alan Kelly (Tipperary North, Labour)

I am glad to see the Minister of State back in here because we spoke about this in March so I am sure he is fully on top of it and has some good news for me. This issue is very personal for me. I have said here before that I fought for this. St. Conlon's Nursing Home was very personal for me. Many members of my family had their last days there. It provided an incredible service and the staff were amazing. However, HIQA wanted to close it because it was not meeting requirements. We had to fight to get funding and a site. I had to work with the HSE, in particular Joe Hoare. We found the site. I got the funding when I was a Minister. Construction started in May 2021, €24 million was spent and it was ready in early 2024. All that is positive.

This is where the problems start. I have visited the site. Nobody was being transferred. We were waiting for 18 or 19 people to be transferred from St. Conlon's to a 50-bed state-of-the-art facility. A total of €24 million of taxpayers has been spent and it is lying idle. As the Minister of State is aware, the HSE took it over. It is a step-down facility. I, along with Councillors Louise Morgan Walsh and Fiona Bonfield and Independent Councillor Seamus Morris, marched with thousands of people through the streets of Nenagh protesting about the fact that so many elderly people could not get access to that home. Some of these who protested have now passed. Those who were there have lost out on using this facility despite paying their taxes all their years. There are now quite a number of people in locations around north Tipperary, particularly next door in the actual hospital, who are high dependency - people who need three attendants to lift them out of a bed - have been there for months and need to get into this nursing home.

Following on from what the Minister of State said to me last March and in light of the fact that Bartra has left the actual facility it was running with the HSE for UHL, when will this open? I do not want to know when the 18 residents in St. Conlon's will come across. I want to know that only as a component of this answer because the regional executive officer told me and others that this would come back in a year. I was also assured at a meeting attended by his colleagues and about which the Minister of State would have been informed when we have our regional meetings in Catherine Street in Limerick that they had the whole year to get the resources in place to make sure staffing was available, so I do not want to hear anything about staffing not being available. They had a whole bloody year to get the people. There are queues of people on panels to fill this nursing home. Bartra, which was wrongly put in there to run a step-down facility, has now finished.

This building is empty. HIQA takes weeks. It would probably take minutes to sign off on this as a nursing home again because it is state-of-the-art. It is incredible. We are very proud of it.

I need to know when the 50 beds so many families and so many people need opened will open. We have suffered so much in Nenagh and north Tipperary when it comes to health services. When will this state-of-the-art nursing home, which should have been opened 18 months ago, be fully opened and fully staffed, given the commitments by the HSE and by the Minister of State here previously in March that it would happen in the third quarter of this year? It is now September. I want to know not just when the 18 residents of St. Conlon’s will transfer and the staff will transfer but also when it will fully open, and I do not want to hear any issues about staffing or HIQA or anything else.

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