Rose Conway Walsh (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for being present. I did not know whether to laugh or to cry when I saw this motion. When I heard that Fianna Fáil believes that the best option is for people to be kept in their own homes, I thought of how I longed to hear that sentence in 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011 when we led campaigns to try to stop Fianna Fáil from socially and economically ruining the system that was in place for home help. I have a question for Fianna Fáil today. Is it going to apologise for the savage cuts it made to home help, community hospitals, community nursing homes and primary care? That is exactly what Fianna Fáil did. I would really appreciate it if someone from Fianna Fáil could stand up and say that I am wrong. However, I know that between 31 August 2009 and 31 August 2010, in Mayo alone, Fianna Fáil cut 32,000 hours of home help from the most severely disadvantaged and vulnerable people across the county. That is not me saying that; it is an absolute fact. Fianna Fáil privatised the home help system, sacked swathes of home help workers, put them into private care and told them that they could no longer work under the HSE. They told elderly people that they were not even worth one hour of home help - it had to be 30 minutes or 45 minutes and it could not be the hour.

I do not have dementia so I remember trying to fight for the 99-year old man in Westport who had two hours of home help a day. Fianna Fáil said that he could not have two hours and could not possibly have an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon. That could not be possible under Fianna Fáil. It could not be done. Those are the kinds of fights I had for people in the community. That is why I longed to hear the line that Fianna Fáil believed that the best option for people was to be kept in their own homes. It is very difficult.

I hope Senators can understand that it is very difficult for me to stand here today and think that Fianna Fáil is going to be the saviour of home help, community care and all of that. I just do not buy it. Fianna Fáil actually made family carers weigh out the soiled nappies of the people they were caring for because they thought they were using up too many nappies and could save some costs through that. That is what Fianna Fáil did. Again, this is not me making it up; it is very well documented. This is why I cannot sit and listen to this. The closure of 40 beds in the hospital in my own community in Belmullet, despite a major community action group effort, was insisted upon by the Fianna Fáil Government. It would not lift the moratorium it imposed to put some nurses and staff in to care for those beds. That is why the people now do not have the respite care they need. That is why they cannot keep their elderly people in their own homes because they cannot even get the week or two weeks during the year because the beds are no longer there. It was an ethical decision made by Fianna Fáil and carried on by Fine Gael, because although Fine Gael did not do it to the extent that Fianna Fáil did, I know that in Mayo alone there have been cuts of a further 9,000 hours or so to home help hours to complement the 32,000 hours cut by Fianna Fáil. They would not listen to the communities, the carers or anybody else.

Primary care is connected to this issue. Fianna Fáil set up the models of primary care in 2001 and there were ten pilot projects across the country, but it would not resource them. It would not put in the resources so that it could do what it said it would do on the tin. That is why, as I speak, we have elderly people in beds - if they can even get them - in the nursing home in my area who are crippled because they have not got a physiotherapist to give them the treatment they need. They are physically crippled. They cannot go out into their own homes because they do not have that physiotherapy there and they cannot have it in the hospitals. What has been done is inhumane and it was started by Fianna Fáil and continued by this Government

. I can only draw the conclusion that Fianna Fáil suffers from selective amnesia around this issue. I will not say dementia and I will not say Alzheimer's. Are we now to believe that Fianna Fáil has had a conversion on the road to Damascus? I want to ask why. I want an explanation on behalf of the people Fianna Fáil treated in this way. I believe it owes those people an apology. Does Fianna Fáil now admit that it was wrong? Does Fianna Fáil now admit that its policy on home care, primary care, the closure of district and community hospitals and the privatisation of nursing homes was wrong?

Naturally, Sinn Féin will support this motion, but we are certainly not fooled by the disingenuous attempts of Fianna Fáil to cod the people into thinking that it would not implement the savage cuts was it to get the opportunity again. They inflicted these savage cuts on the most vulnerable people in our society who are dependent on this home care. They persecuted carers through cut after cut after cut. Carers are the most neglected group in our society. I commend the job that is done by carers in our society because the 24-hour care that they provide is holding up the whole of our society. I also commend the dementia action groups, other action groups and the home help action groups who fight for care for these people. It must be hugely difficult for these people to work inside that system. I know many people who actually had to leave because they could not bear it. They could not bear to see the suffering in the communities and not have the resources to be in a position to do something about it.

The Minister of State and his Government are now responsible for providing adequate resources to ensure the immediate implementation of the national dementia strategy. I ask him to do that as a matter of urgency. I ask him to reverse the cuts that were made by Fianna Fáil and I ask him to do it as quickly as he possibly can because we are talking about a very vulnerable group of people who are in the late stages of their lives. In many cases, there will not be a chance of a long-term strategy. Resources have to be put in immediately to protect the most vulnerable in our society. What does it say about us as a country and as a Republic? There is no point in us going out and spending loads of money on commemorations and everything else if we do not look after the most vulnerable in our society.

I know the people who are presenting this Bill tonight and my argument is certainly not personal to them.We need to learn from them and to bring this forward. Unless people admit to having made major policy mistakes in the past, we are not going to correct them.