Lynn Ruane (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I will not need the eight minutes. I had not planned on speaking but as I was listening to everyone's contributions, I could not help thinking back over so many of the faces and the cases of adult abuse I have witnessed over the years. Although we have uncovered some of the most extreme cases, there are many cases that are so subtle and so carefully manipulated that we will never be able to pinpoint that they are happening.

I remember one woman who was living in a homeless service and who had managed to get away from her family. Her sons and her husband had been constantly sexually abusing and raping her. When she found refuge in a city centre hostel, that family continued, every week, to find her at her local post office, to further beat her up and to take her weekly money so that she would be left begging on the streets. That was obviously an awful situation, but I learned as I worked longer in the homeless service that it was not an isolated case of family members finding a vulnerable adult wherever they had found refuge and continuing the abuse.

There was another woman who lived in her home in the Dublin 12 community. Her son came every week and did the same. He would take her money and leave. She would be left begging outside the shops within her own community because she did not have access to her own social welfare money. The issue of financial abuse of older people is huge. How do we unearth that it is happening within families? How do we even get there? It is quite scary to think that we might never be able to fully protect vulnerable people.

Another case comes to mind. My father died four years ago this week. He obviously had quite a young family. He was quite old when I was born, so he was in the fortunate position of having a young daughter who did not really listen to the advice of the medical profession and kept insisting on more. I unearthed so many different illnesses that he had and that the medical professionals tried to say he did not have. I had no medical background but I fought for years to get a proper diagnosis for my father. I refused to believe their diagnoses and it turned out in the end that I was right. There was one thing that stood out to me throughout my father's illness. He had dementia. I remember going to the hospital one day - I will not name the hospital because I have an ongoing back-and-forth with it- and my father sang. He found refuge in song. Every time he felt uncomfortable or scared of a situation because of hallucinations caused by his Lewy body disease, he would sing. The one thing he could remember, and which took him back to that moment of safety, were the words of a song. We sang every day until the day he died and I taught him songs, even right up to those of Paolo Nutini. He was still learning until the day he died.

I remember going up to the hospital one day. I experienced a lot of things that no older person should have to endure. I witnessed him being left in his own urine, being left without his catheter and having to fight for things. Medical treatment - operations that he should have had - were withheld. The doctors tried to make out that he was too old or unfit for them. One of the things that hurt me most when I went up there related to the question of medication.One day he was completely out of it and I asked the nurse: "Why is my Dad so out of it? Why is he sedated?" He was never distressed, violent or a problem. As he had become immobile, he was never a flight risk. He had never tried to run out of the hospital. When the nurse gave me her answer, it was as if it was normal; I could not believe the culture that had been created in the health service was to provide medication. She said to me, "Your Dad was singing all night." I could not believe the health service had decided to over-medicate to shut my father up because he had been singing to get through the night, the fact that he was not in his own home or bed, or the fact that he might have been hallucinating. What I had taught him to do every time he felt he was hallucinating was to sing and they had sedated him for doing so. He was not the only person to whom it was happening. There are family members who do not realise their older relatives are being medicated unnecessarily. It is an attack on their agency, autonomy and human rights.

There is also the withholding of medication. I worked in hostels and remember witnessing a worker withholding HIV medication from someone to try to curb their behaviour because it was chaotic. They withheld vital medication to try to stop them from behaving in that manner. It was scary and so sad to see. The Bill is important on many levels. We have far to go in protecting vulnerable persons. The withholding medication is an abuse of human rights. I look forward to seeing how the Bill can be improved and made stronger. I thank Senator Colette Kelleher. I did not realise until today how many areas it touched. It was only when everyone started to talk I realised it was so far-reaching. Other Senators have given it their support. I look forward to it being enacted and implemented, I hope within the next 12 months, but even 12 months is too long as how many more older people will be abused in that time?