Post office worker called gardaí when ill pensioner missed her pension payment

"They found the lady inside and she was very ill. Thank God she is alive but if they hadn’t gone to the house what would have happened?”

A pensioner in her nineties who fell seriously ill at home was saved from serious harm when a vigilant post office worker called gardaí after she became concerned about a missed pension payment.

Paddy O’Brien, who has worked as an advocate for the elderly in Cork for 60 years, says that three recent inquests which detailed how pensioners lay dead in their homes for months without being discovered were far from isolated incidents.