This Bill is about something very simple, namely who we trust to go into homes of our older people and people with disabilities and what standards we insist on. Independent Ireland supports strong, common-sense regulation. Nobody wants low-quality or unsafe care happening behind closed doors. There are positives here. For the first time, home support providers will have to register with HIQA. There will be national standards and proper inspections with the person's consent. There will also be a public register that families can check and emergency powers to stop dangerous services. We will finally get real data on where home support hours are going and who is providing them. Regulation on its own is not enough. There is still no statutory right to home care, promised since 2017. It is still missing today. This Bill does not deliver a single extra hour of support. You cannot regulate your way out of the staffing and beds crisis. Once again, family carers are invisible. There is no relief, no supports and no move to end the means test. Home help workers, who have been doing an incredible job, are being contracted for one set of hours, and then pressurised to work far more. A worker might have a 20-hour contract on paper, something that affects their mortgage and family life but is regularly pushed to work 30 hours or more. Others with 39-hour contracts are only given 30 hours in a week, with the rest pushed into the next. Split shifts are now routine. Workers sit at home, unpaid for hours, only to be called back out while the agency staff are being brought in to fill gaps. If they get sick, take a holiday or need a day off, they are expected to arrange their own cover without proper rosters. They are missing out on overtime and other entitlements. That is a direct loss of income for people who are already stretched. These workers are not asking for anything extra; they are simply asking for management to honour their contracts, proper 39-hour rosters issued four weeks in advance, and agencies used only when absolutely necessary. In my own constituency, families waited months for basic home help hours. An older person should not have to choose between a nursing home they do not want and no support at home. Independent Ireland stands for safe care, fair care and a real choice to age at home. I just had a case where an 82-year-old man in west Cork with stage 4 cancer has been discharged from Bantry Hospital after three months and cannot get home help. This gentleman needs help with personal care and administering his medication but there is no home help available to this vulnerable man. In another case, a gentleman in west Cork has been waiting for over four months for home help. The HSE is unable to provide it as it has no staff available. That is what we are being told. Private operators, such as Bluebird Care, that work for the HSE were unable to provide it due to the lack of staff. Interestingly, Bluebird could provide it if the family were to pay privately, rather than through the HSE. In another case, a young man, again from west Cork - I have the addresses here but I do not like reading out addresses because it might identify someone - is farming and caring for his mother who has dementia. He can only get home help Monday to Friday. There is no home help at the weekends. He wishes that farming was a five-day week job but it is not. Another case features a gentleman in a retirement village in west Cork who is looking for home help for his wife who has numerous medical issues. He is unable to get the home help. The bottom line is that the home helps can do the extra hours but they will not be given them. Those at the top tell me that there are no home help hours available. There is strange carry-on going on behind the scenes that I would like to get to the bottom of but if I opened the can, there would be worms flying everywhere. There are people who get home help in the evenings and the home helps are calling at 5 p.m. or 6 p.m. and putting the person to bed. There seems to be no allowance for people who would like to go to bed later. CoAction is adopting a new method for training their recruits called "earn as you learn" whereby those who are training to work as home support workers with CoAction do not have to have a QQI level 5 in order to apply for the position. They do the practical work with an experienced qualified support worker, study in the evenings and get paid from get-go.

Sentiment score: 0.18