Danny Healy-Rae demands better home care and equal nursing funding

Thank you very much. First of all, I want to thank the Labour Party for the greatest opportunity to talk about this very important topic, indeed a very emotive subject, when families have to make the decision to go into a nursing home. And I vividly remember when my own father wasn't great and a decision had to be made and I'm glad that we were able to keep him in his own home with Kathleen Fitzgerald and thank all the people, Noreen Sullivan, Jackie Heron, Willem Leary and I leave out people and I'm sad about that, but I want to thank all those people who helped him in his final days and he did die in Tralee Hospital. And I want to thank the staff there and the staff in Killarney District Hospital for the great attention and care that they gave him every day and all that he was there. They're wonderful people and we want to thank him. We never forget him. Yes, he did say that a nursing home was kind of a departure lounge and that when you go there, you know, there's not much hope coming out of it. So that was one of the things he felt and said. And I know to many people, you know, when they're not improving, you're not getting better and they're getting worse. Families have to make the decision and like a lot of people keep them at home and they should get more help to keep their loved ones at home. And we see the Denmark model. That's what's happening there. There's hardly any nursing homes we're taught in Denmark and we should strive to better our home care system and it would save us a lot of money. But at the present time, very hot about what we see in RTE. Now there are a lot of great nursing homes out there. Family type nursing homes that are run by families. We have them in Kilmer, we have them in Kilmer, we have them in Kilmer, we have them in Kilmer, we have them in Kilmer and different places. And we're lucky enough in Kerry, we didn't have that. But I worry about the big business companies that own an amount of nursing homes. They have a different model. They have to make the thing pay. They're not about the treasers. And I worry about the system where public nursing homes we know are getting more funding than private nursing homes. It costs the same to mind to operate a bed for whoever it is or to operate a room. There should be the same funding for both. And there should be no excuse at any time to mistreat or treat elderly people badly. People that got us to where we are here today. People who strive day in and day out to real families to keep maybe employees going and did all they could to provide homes for their families and all that. And surely they deserve the government's best to ensure that they are properly seen after. Carers and home helps. And there's another dimension that's very valuable and isn't being appreciated enough where people come in and sleep with elderly people, sleep not in the beds with them but in the house and keep them, you know, that they're there for the whole long night and stay with them till morning. They should get rewarded better than they are because I know that families in that instance have to pay for that themselves. And the state should intervene here. We're talking about people that are trying to stay in their home for as long as possible. Like I said, the model in Denmark, we should strive to ensure or to try to develop that system where people would be seen after in their home. And we see this too often when people are awarded home help, they're leaving the hospital and they're told they're qualifying for home help. Then there's no home helps there, ministers. They're not to be phoned. And that's an awful time in families. They should be there the minute that they land home the following evening, the following days. They shouldn't have to wait because what happens in a lot of cases, these people have to return to the hospital. And that's another reason that our beds are full in hospitals. That happens as one minister because the home helps and in place. And that's, that's terrible. The means test, one of the reasons that I decided to support this government is saying that he'll get rid of that means test and I'm looking forward to that and to helping the carers of Ireland because they're the massive people who do Trojan work to keep people, keep people seen after and, all right, I'm sorry. Gromagot, Ontario. Gromagot.