Kildare South TD calls for statutory right to home care

Image: Houses of the Oireachtas.

A statutory right to home care and the provision of the infrastructure and staff to provide this has been called for by Kildare South TD Mark Wall, writes Brian Byrne. In a Labour Party motion in the Dáil, he proposed a 'fair deal for care' that would mean "the end of privatisation of nursing home care in Ireland."

Deputy Wall noted that a right to home care has been promised by successive Governments since 2017 but there has not yet been any real progress on this. "Instead, the only option that older people and their families are faced with is nursing home care. The average length of stay in a nursing home is around three years. This reflects the level of decline that many older people experience due to privatisation, where shareholders are more concerned with profits than the care and well-being of older people."

The deputy said he had constituency cases in recent times which demonstrated a 'huge issue' of people waiting for housing adaptation grants from local authorities. "Yet they cannot move into their homes because those housing adaptation grants have not been sanctioned. Surely an intervention from the Minister of State would allow those people to go back to live in their own homes and allow that bed to be freed up for somebody else," he said.

A Government amendment to the motion, which committed inter alia to a review of inspection and monitoring of nursing homes, additional nursing home capacity, and a review of ownership structures, was described by the deputy as "not a Government listening or caring, but a Government promoting privatisation."  He said that over the last 20 years a small number of multinational corporations and foreign investment funds have taken a 'stranglehold' on the nursing home sector.

Photographs use Policy — Privacy Policy