Noel O'Donovan (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State to the Chamber and congratulate him on his appointment. I had engagement with him in his previous role and he showed energy, drive and determination when he visited Bantry after the recent flooding so I am sure he will bring a similar type of work to this Department.

It is timely to have this debate on improving supports for elderly people as our first Private Members’ motion. I finished college in 2011 and will never forget the words of one of my lecturers who said in the next ten years there would be more people over 65 than under 25. That is a statistic that has always stayed in my mind, so it is timely we are having this discussion.

In my first contribution in this Chamber I spoke about the issue of loneliness briefly and I raise it again. It is an issue we are not tackling as a society and a country. The effects it has on a society are profound. Loneliness is not just about being alone. It is often about feeling disconnected, unheard and unseen. It is also about feeling you are a person of very little value to society and can creep up on anyone from a child trying to make friends in school to the woman navigating motherhood on her own. Such a pressing area of loneliness is just how steadily it can pry itself into the lives of the elderly people in our society, especially those who are struggling to keep up with the societal commitments of the modern age. In such a busy and growing society it is often overlooked just how small the world of an elderly person can become. I often meet elderly people and they talk about listening in to the work of the Oireachtas and following what we do online so I am sure there are many people looking in on our proceedings today. I hope they know we are working on their behalf.

The European Commission found in 2022 that Ireland had the highest rates of loneliness in the EU, with 20% of Irish people feeling lonely most or all of the time. That is a staggering statistic. Having the highest rates of anything so detrimental would have alarm bells ringing all over the country, so why is that not the case with loneliness? We have to do more. People often do not realise loneliness is not just about sitting around or waiting for the doorbell to ring and the kettle to boil. It is also an increase in the risk of depression, heart disease, anxiety, stroke and Parkinson’s disease. Loneliness is smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Loneliness can be a premature death. ALONE’s loneliness task force found the mortality effects of loneliness can be even greater than many of the lifestyle and traditional clinical risk factors we treat as serious attacks on our State’s health. It is a silent pandemic. We cannot look at this and not recognise it as a national public health crisis. Loneliness is not an inevitable aspect of life and it is time we start believing that. We must recognise loneliness is not just a personal issue requiring one’s own rejection of it but is also a societal issue we need to work more effectively on. We must look at supporting community initiatives, sports clubs, cultural centres and volunteer organisations that play a pivotal role in diminishing the risk of loneliness.

Digital exclusion is another matter and something we urgently need to tackle to ensure people do not feel they are left behind in a rapidly changing digital society. Supporting initiatives that seek to help older people learn and access these digital spaces independently is something we can do as a society to tackle this threat. Society cannot just support these initiatives without ensuring there is a way to access them. Being from west Cork I can recognise the importance of accessible transport services as a way for people to form connections in their community. They physical isolation of people, especially in rural Ireland, is something I am all too familiar with and the way we progress our society should foster connection, not isolation. I commend the previous work done in this area by our now Tánaiste and a predecessor of mine, former Deputy, Jim Daly, when he was in the Department. In 2019, a €3 million fund was announced to support community initiatives that alleviated loneliness. The pandemic arrived after that and we all know what that did to the prevalence of loneliness, so we must get back on track and start the conversation again. To do that we must fully understand and realise what the issues affecting loneliness are and why it is there within our society. I ask the Minister of State to work with ALONE in this area. It has called for research to be carried out in a number of areas. We can resolve this if we think outside the box a little bit. Let us consider the number of students in our communities who are off on summer holidays in weekends. We could get them back working in the community. There could be tax incentives in line with the SUSI grants. We can do more on this if we think outside the box. I thank the Minister of State for his time.