Nurses protest over home’s conditions

NURSES at a home for intellectually disabled people where knee-high weeds clog recreation areas and plaster is peeling from walls have begun protest action to improve conditions.

After waiting 16 years for new accommodation for residents of Kelvin Grove, Co Carlow, members of the Psychiatric Nurses Association (PNA) held a two-hour lunchtime protest yesterday which they intend to escalate if alternative living conditions are not provided quickly.

Des Kavanagh, general secretary of the PNA, said plans to provide new accommodation had been “on the wall near the nurse manager’s office” since he had worked in Kelvin Grove in the late 1980s.