Irish Examiner view: Inadequate care for older people cannot continue

If a nursing home becomes part of a family conversation in relation to a loved one, it is often when it has become absolutely necessary and nothing else will work. So the shortage of nursing home places has the potential to cause quite significant trauma for many families and individuals choosing this option. File picture 

To judge a society by how the elderly are cared for, one would have to say the report card for Ireland today is worrying.

Demographics don’t suddenly jump up and surprise us on a given day. We know we have an ageing population, and this has been the clearly forming picture for a long time.

Yet to read Niamh Griffin’s reporting on the shape of nursing home provision is to see that what this country has is woefully inadequate. To the extent that plans were made to address the shortfall, these relatively meagre ambitions are not even reaching their own targets.

The ESRI estimates that we need an additional 1,000 long-term residential care beds into the system every year until 2040. Looking in that context at plans made in 2022 to open seven new facilities by 2024, and to provide 530 beds to those in need in Cork, Kerry, Tipperary, Louth, and Westmeath, the picture is sobering. Only two of those seven nursing homes are now up and running, with a third due to open.

Hiqa said seven nursing homes closed in 2024, while four opened. Nursing Homes Ireland chief executive Tadgh Daly said: “The lack of availability of beds is acute.”

More alarmingly, when it comes to planning for the future, he said we are simply not planning. In a landscape where large-scale private investors are more likely to walk away from the sector, particularly in rural areas, the funding model for developments is clearly not working.

This is a hammer blow for those families who are running out of options and in desperate need of the support provided by a nursing home. Anecdotally, the elderly frequently opt to live at home if at all possible for as long as possible. Home-carer statistics are testament to this reality of families doing their utmost to facilitate those who would dearly like their late years to be spent in their own homes. The age of home-carers is now toppling over into the later stages of old age, where the very old are left to mind the very old.

Latest figures show that, at the most extreme end, 565 carers in Cork are themselves aged between 80 and 85.

If a nursing home becomes part of a family conversation in relation to a loved one, it is often when it has become absolutely necessary and nothing else will work. So the shortage of nursing home places has the potential to cause quite significant trauma for many families and individuals choosing this option. To learn that 2022 plans that were at best modest are dramatically past their 2024 deadline and still not fully operational is deflating.

The Government’s long-term residential care additional capacity plan, which was due to be published last year, has yet to see the light of day. Health minister Jennifer Carroll MacNeill promises it will be published “in the later part of this year”.

For those who can’t get into a nursing home it is, in a much more real sense, already late. Time is not on their side.

Sweet harmony in Belfast

Musical traditions playing out on the streets of Belfast have all too often been usurped by echoes of sectarianism rather that anything more harmonious and inclusive. The idea of holding the Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann in Belfast must have struck some as having the potential to strike all the wrong notes. It is to the tremendous credit of the organisers that some of the old hymn sheets for how communities interact were reimagined with such dynamism.

With the ink dry now for almost three decades on the Good Friday Agreement, one could be forgiven for feeling despondent at times that old enmities and old hurts — not to mention new fears of the ‘foreign’ — were still informing more recent community relations. However, the organisers of the Fleadh in Belfast took to their task with imagination, determination, and a spirited emphasis on inclusion to tap into the better nature of so many people.

Theirs was the belief that what communities have in common surpasses what divides, and that what makes each community different can enrich rather than diminish a society.

It is inspiring to see what the organisers and the thousands of participants and million-plus audience managed to achieve in just a week, and to witness a powerful living example of fortune favouring the brave.

Niall McClean, co-chair of the organising committee, said: “We’ve done something that has never, ever happened in this city before. We’ve brought every single community together — and everybody has absolutely loved it.”

Lee Reynolds, commissioner for Ulster Scots and the Ulster-British tradition, agreed, saying Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann achieved “better representation and relationship with the Ulster Scots and Ulster-British identities” than had been managed in many years.

Politicians from all sides would do well to have faith in their communities’ ability to find harmony with their neighbours. No party will be forgiven for entrenching again and whipping their voters into only hearing the music from over the wall as something to distrust.

Elf and safety

“Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.” The fictional character of Aedh, created by WB Yeats, used this solemn prayer that his love might be respected.

Now to the pantheon of prayers from fictional characters comes one from, or on behalf of, Dobby the Elf, that could be expressed a little less beautifully: “Lay your half-billion-euro underground, undersea electric cable softly because you lay it on Dobby’s grave.”

Somewhat surprisingly, the many fans of the fictional pointy-eared creature found a friendly ear in the commercial world when the company behind the plan to link Britain and Ireland with this technology decided to divert the massive structure to avoid crossing Freshwater West beach in Pembrokeshire, Wales, immortalised in one of the Harry Potter films as the final resting place of Dobby. 

In the kind of irony beloved of literary folk, the pipeline will now run closer to a real-life Bronze Age burial site rather than upset fiction fans.

If the creatives at the Greenlink Interconnector company ever flirted with the catchphrase for their cabling, “power to the people”, they may do well to rephrase it in case Potterheads lose the run of themselves completely.