Róisín Garvey (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State, Deputy O'Donnell, for coming to the House. I would love to see the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, coming here some time to take questions on housing. I am afraid the Minister of State is the fall guy. I am sure the Minister is busy.

A total of 15% of our population are over 65 years of age. I regularly receive telephone calls from older people living in isolation and seeking home help provision, not because they are sick but because they are lonely. Home help is not available on those grounds. I am involved in a housing association with an amazing man called Frank Gunter, my praise for whom I want to put on the record. Turning 81 this year, he has pioneered housing provision in our village of Inagh and has now linked up with a great housing association called Inis Housing to look at the needs of older people. He has already managed to house 12 older people in Inagh. I know those people. I visited them every day during the lockdowns to deliver water. It has made a huge difference to their lives to be living in the village and able to walk to the shop.

Separate to that, Frank Gunter and the brilliant people in Inis Housing did a survey of older people in north Clare, which found that hundreds of them would happily downsize if given the opportunity to do so. They are rattling around on their own in big houses, which they must maintain and heat. Some of them are lonely because they used to have full houses. Not everybody wants to move out of his or her house and that is fine. However, there are older people who might like to downsize and move out of rural isolation and into their local village or town, where they can participate in their community instead of having to figure out how they will get there. As we all know, rural transport is great from village to village with the Local Link service, but it does not, for the most part, get people from door to door. Older people cannot always physically walk or cycle to where they want to go. That is not an option for them.

I have been thinking a lot about the situation of older people based on what I see in rural Ireland when I canvass there. I meet many people who live on their own in the middle of nowhere. In the old days, there were big families, with loads of people with all the time in the world to call in on older people and do all the bothántaíocht and all of that. Those days are gone. People are very busy all the time and I acknowledge some of them are great with their neighbours. AI recall, however, approximately ten years ago, there was an old man living next to me. I found him in his home when he had been dead for four days. That is a perfect example of how we are failing our older people. By 2050, one in four of us will be over 65. This is a huge issue.

When the housing association in which I am involved sought planning permission recently to turn a large and lovely old convent that is currently an eyesore into 30 independent living spaces, we were told we could only build 12 because the need was not there for more. There is something wrong with this process. That is what the director of services had down on her official needs assessment or whatever it was. What is being done to provide such housing for older people? The director of services said in this instance that the need was not there, going on the figures she had. We were told we could build 12 units, when we know we could do with hundreds.Is it somebody in the Department's job, or ideally the job of a whole team, to think about giving our older population opportunities to downsize? We know there is a housing shortage. Maybe those older people could sell the house to a family. We could bring families into those towns and villages. I am not talking about shoving them into horrible places. We have good practice and there are good designs. There are good examples, including a great example in the village of Kilmaley, an amazing place for older people. We have good independent living in Inagh as well. It can be done well, but I worry when we are told permission will not be given for 30 units because only 12 are needed. I do not think this is the local authority’s fault. Maybe there is a wider issue. There was no question on this in the census, for example. Maybe we need to look at that. When we get those data, we may realise how vital it is that we start building housing for older people, especially in places where we want to do up big old buildings that are eyesores. We have a company, a voluntary organisation, that wants to do this but is it Frank Gunter’s job, at the age of 80, to be driving this project? Surely to God it is the job of someone in the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage to drive this and assist people such as Mr. Gunter who is a hero in our community.