Ulick Burke (Fine Gael)

I welcome the opportunity to contribute to the discussion on this NDA report. It is very important that we discuss it. However, we are discussing it at the first sitting of 2004 and it is a pity that we did not deal with it during 2003, which was the year of people with disabilities. I have two great concerns. As a member of the Western Health Board over several years, I know that tremendous improvements have occurred in terms of resources and additional places. I sincerely welcome those as part of an ongoing process. However, tragically, in the Western Health Board area and at St. Brigid's Hospital in Ballinasloe, we have several persons, most of them young, who are literally condemned to a placement which is totally unsuitable for those with special needs. There are people with intellectual and physical disabilities. I can find no words other than "criminal abandonment" if any structure or system allows that situation to continue indefinitely and especially after the year just gone. Those people will remain there this year, next year and three years hence.

It is absolutely incumbent on the Minister to examine, within the mental health institutions that exist today, the number of people who are similarly kept in totally unsuitable circumstances. The system that allows that to continue is indicted as a failure. It is my simple plea to the Minister today that he stop that practice. The number of various standard mental institutions has declined. Tremendous work has been done over the years through taking people from institutions and placing them in the community, sometimes in rented accommodation. We must acknowledge the great acceptance by the community at large of this new departure whereby people who were literally — I hate to use the word — locked up in institutions are now brought into the communities and willingly accepted in the towns where there were psychiatric hospitals and facilities over the years.

I know the case of St. Brigid's Hospital in Ballinasloe best. It has had a great reduction in the number of patients held in it for treatment. They are getting excellent treatment there. I am not in any way doing down the service provided in those institutions, but it is a welcome development that we are taking people from the institutions and placing them in the community. I am well aware of the fact that there is a solid core of people who were themselves as adults — perhaps as young adults — put into those institutions and literally abandoned. Thankfully, that day is now gone and a process is in place where those who need to go there do so, rather than being abandoned for whatever reason, as was the case in the past. My plea to the Minister is that he examine in great detail the number of persons with physical and mental disabilities who are retained within those institutions and have no place to go.

My other point concerns what Senator O'Toole said about the elderly who have what were children and are now young adults who are themselves ageing. Those elderly parents are in crisis and do not know what will happen to their children when they die. Over the years, they have provided sterling support for them in their homes. I have an example. Many public representatives on tour in my own constituency visited a facility where a mother of about 75 years of age said that she had to drag her young son, an able-bodied person, to the wall so that he could put his feet against it and crawl into a standing position. She felt totally unable to help him.

While we have such situations in communities, perhaps with people getting only a daily or hourly service of care in temporary centres, there is a great obligation to provide and focus whatever funding may become available. I recognise that it may be scarce, but people are in crisis and shouting for help. They cannot get an answer from anyone. It would be worse were it not for the voluntary effort of parents, as Senator O'Toole said, and many other groups that came together over the years to provide for, recognise and highlight problems in societies, communities and families.

Until those voluntary groups became organised and made pleas to public representatives, health boards and Ministers over the years, there was no recognition of the plight of families and communities.

Single parents who have the cross to bear of a mentally or physically handicapped person are forced out to work. They are also faced with a 24 hour care service need for a severely handicapped person. Such people will get respite for just one weekend in four, five or more, perhaps from late Saturday evening when he or she finishes work until late Sunday evening when the person must be collected and taken home.

While we can mention the impressive global figures to which the Minister of State already referred, I want him to identify the special and specific needs of a hard core which is only represented by a number. The tragedy is that they are neglected. I want the Minister of State to consider the people in our mental institutions today because their case is one of criminal abandonment in a modern society.