Regina Doherty (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I probably will not take five minutes. I want to concentrate on the ask. I commend my colleagues on the breadth of this motion. I thank them for their commitment over the last couple of years. They have done a stellar job. I know they could do ten times as much if they were let but I put on record that their commitment really shines through.

I commend the HSE on the near-annual recruitment of NCHDs. We have this two-year rotation and go off to other countries to make sure we get our doctors back so that we have junior doctors in our hospitals. We do the same for our nurses. We go off to the four corners of the world looking to get our Irish nurses back and other nurses to come here and save us. Now the Minister of State is talking about the launch of a new plan by the HSE called "Be part of our team, be part of their lives" which is great because it recognises all the vacancies we have among all the disciplines. We all come to the House week in, week out, to speak about how much of a shortage there is.

The one glaring omission, and this is my ask today, is that we have 27,000 men and women in this country working as healthcare assistants, HCAs, across the entire spectrum of our hospitals, in nursing homes, in residential care homes and in people's homes. However, we still have nearly 10,000 families waiting for healthcare assistants to come and help them. We have no recruitment speciality programme to go out to train HCAs here - we could have buckets of people training them if we just had a proper programme - or to recruit HCAs from other countries. Can we add HCA as a speciality within the carer strategy and the "Be part of our team, be part of our lives" recruitment programme to acknowledge that they do enormous work? In the last year, I have seen the absolute random acts of kindness done by young men and women who look after our aged population, not only in our nursing homes but also in their own homes. I wish we could have multiples of them but if we do not proactively go out to train or recruit them, and make it a really positive profession in which to be involved, we are not going to get any more people in that industry.

I commend Senator Kyne on the last comment he made. We have a real problem in this country with leaving ageing parents who have adult children with disabilities, who perhaps go to respite care a couple of times a year, with no pathway to reassure them as they get older that they do not have to worry about what will happen to their children. We all know parents in families who are worried about their daughter or son who might have to look after their brother or sister when they eventually go to their eternal reward, and it is not fair. There are far too many people in this country living with stress and trauma about which we could actually do something. I really wish we had a proactive strategy. I know we do not have buckets of money to say it will be done tomorrow but I wish we could give people peace of mind to reassure them that as a State, we will step in when we need to.