I thank the Minister of State for the opportunity to speak on the Health (Amendment) (Home Support Providers) Bill 2025. It is long awaited. Initially, it was due before the House five years ago. Repeated delays in its publication have had a detrimental effect on carers and the people who require home care support. This Bill means that home support in Ireland will be independently regulated for the first time. It shows a troubling disregard for home support providers and users in this country. It is all about regulation. I look at it from my unique point of view as somebody who has worked in this sector and been a victim of a lack of regulation with regard to defective concrete. The two go hand in hand. To me, looking at this, the sectors are completely unregulated. This is going on in 2026 and it needs to be looked at seriously. There are currently no regulations that home care providers have to adhere to in areas such as staff training and infection control, which is vital when we are dealing with people with sickness in certain elements. There are no consistent minimum standards of care that apply to home care providers universally and there are no independent oversight provisions for home care services, which is vital. Due to absence of regulation, there is a huge disparity between the level and quality of care geographically. If you are dealing with somebody in Malin Head who has to go to certain parts of Malin or into certain parts of Buncrana, they are on the road and they are on the clock, basically. In Donegal, for example, there are severe shortages of home carers for quality services. It varies massively due to enormous pressures put on home care workers. It is about that time element again whereby you are going in to look after and care for somebody and you are getting them ready for bed but you are also conscious that there is somebody else waiting for you and that the clock is ticking and the time is running down. According to the HSE, there are nearly 3,000 people receiving home support in Donegal and over 350 people waiting to avail of that support. Speaking of such cases, I will not mention names, but during a phone call today a cousin of mine who is in Letterkenny general hospital told me about a 93-year-old lady in the hospital who wants to go home. She is ready to go home. She has been in there for nearly a fortnight but they cannot get the home packages in place. They are close. I would be grateful for anything the Minister of State could do to intervene in this. I will get back to him on that. Any further delays could push the implementation of this out to 2030, which would be another unacceptable delay. As we have heard throughout the House, we have a population that is ageing and we need to evolve with that. We need to ensure that the sector is regulated and that quality and consistency of care is raised nationally in order that we have a standard that is the pride of Europe. It is all about the standard and the pride in your work. That needs to be really looked at, especially when it comes to home care. The impression you make on that person determines their day. It is very hard to encourage people to come into this sector because it is demanding and you are on the road for 12 hours a day. You leave your house at 7 o'clock in the morning and sometimes it is 9 o'clock at night before you get home, when you have put the last of your clients to bed. Steps need to be taken to encourage home care providers to continue this service. More people need to be working in this sector. There are definitely ways around this. When I was training, the HSE would come in to try to recruit, but it was not flexible. I was willing to do that type of work but the issue for people like me was that we were needed on full-time contracts. A full-time contract would not have suited me because I was providing care for my four children, but I had time during the day - four hours, perhaps - when I could have provided care in the community. I definitely would have done so if flexibility had been provided for. That flexibility leaves open the possibility that when your children grow up, you could go into it full-time. If that were sorted out, it could be a real game changer because a lot of parents would be willing to go into this area and, if they were paid properly, would make it their career. We need to look at that in the long run. In 2016 the Government made a commitment to introduce a statutory right to home care through a statutory home care support scheme. A decade later, this has still not been implemented. We need to make sure it is done. The fair deal scheme provides statutory rights to residential care, but no equivalent scheme currently exists when it comes to home care. We need to look at that because, as has been said, we have an ageing population. In Donegal, for example, we have a heavy reliance - when they are operating - on our hospitals in Lifford, Dungloe and so on. We need to make sure we have sufficient beds in place. There will be people who need care, but the majority of people can be provided with care at home and they will stay in their home for as long as possible before they have to go into some form of care. I recognise that. There is a way out of this if we get the staffing levels right and look at the model. The HSE model is a good example, but the flexibility would be a game changer. It is a matter of allowing parents to come on board properly trained. That is a very important aspect of this. If you are training somebody to do this properly, it takes two years to go in, do your modules, come out of it with a good standard and then do your work experience. Then you go out into the community and you are doing that with a family. It is challenging and hard but it can be done. I look at the private model and I believe we are missing a trick here. The private providers charge a certain amount of money. If we were to pay people the right wage, we would attract numbers that would actually solve this issue. Going forward, we need to look at that. If the Minister of State looks at the model in place now, which does not have that flexibility, he will understand that by allowing somebody to come in at certain times of the day, tied not to a full-time contract but to some kind of contract that means they will give part-time hours, they will be able to fill a gap and help to meet staffing levels, and in the long run they will be attracted to come into this sector.

Sentiment score: 0.25