Eamon Scanlon (Fianna Fail)

I welcome the Minister of State to the House and congratulate him on his elevation. There is no doubt he is a hands-on Minister and is making improvements and changes.

The policy of Fianna Fáil in Government is to maintain older people in dignity and independence at home in accordance with the wishes of older people themselves, as expressed in many research studies. The policy is to restore to independence at home those older people who become ill or dependent, to encourage and support the care of older people in their own community by family, neighbours and voluntary bodies, and to provide a high quality of hospital and residential care for older people when they can no longer be maintained in dignity and independence at home.

In Ireland there are more than 900,000 people aged 50 or over, 11,000 in county Sligo. In the past the growth in the number of older people has been referred to in negative terms. While old age has been associated with dependency, the vast majority of older people are healthy and independent. Our aim in Fianna Fáil is to provide improved services benefiting an older population whose contribution to Irish society is fully acknowledged by this Government.

Additional revenue funding of more than €26 million has been announced for 2003 for services for older people, including palliative care services. Between 1997 and 2001, total additional funding allocated was €168 million, which has enabled over 1,300 additional staff being recruited for these services.

From 1998 to 2001, over 550 additional beds have been provided in new community nursing units and over 1,250 day places per week have been provided in new day care centres. The Minister for Health and Children, Deputy Coughlan, recently announced that work on the development of pilot public private partnership programmes for community nursing units for older people has begun in the Eastern Regional Health Authority and the Southern Health Board areas. These developments will ultimately provide about 850 additional public long-term care beds for older people in such units and thereby take some of the pressure off the acute hospital sector where older people who are fit for discharge are sometimes inappropriately placed in acute hospital beds because of shortage of community nursing unit beds.