Comparing carers and Minister for Health

The Minister of Health had a two page interview a few weeks ago in a few local newspapers. 

 It can best be describe as fawning and he did not seem to be questioned at any stage about his statements. He explains how he is very busy, ‘ I work 100 hours a week, 7 days a week. I also have to be a dad, a husband, a son, a brother and a friend. That makes it 14 hours a day, which sounds very busy…but in truth most carers would be delighted to ‘only’ work 14 hours a day. Most of them are on call for 24 hours every day, that is 168 hours.

 Many get no pay. Some get Carers allowance, a social welfare payment. It is not recognised as a payment for work provided, instead it is a social welfare payment intended to help carers who are poor because they have to care. They earn the massive sum of Eu 220 if you care for one, Eu 330 if you are caring for more. Because it is not a payment for work you are not covered by the present working legislation. So you have no pension rights, no holiday time, no overtime, none of the rights that are looked on as essential by workers in this country. Now I am sure Stephen Donnelly would be willing to do his job for the same pay?

 May I also point out that we all have to wives, husbands, fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters and friends. That is called being a human. 

The Minister explains how busy he was when he took over the job as Minister, since he lost the secretary general of the Ministry of Health, and the Chief Medical officer had to step aside for a while. May I respectfully point out that every carer in the country was very busy at the time, since the Government had effectively closed all day services for people with disability and for elderly. People were dumped on their families. I don’t like using the term dumped, since it sounds denigrating towards the service users, but it is hard to think of another word to describe what happened. Services were closed overnight, with no guidelines of what to do or for how long the closures would continue. 

From what I can see, no real planning took place over the next 6 months either, which leaves you wondering what was being done in the Department at Health at the time. (if truth be told, there still seems to precious little planning at present too….) 

The Minister points out that he provided funding of 7.8 Million to clear the backlog of Assessment of Needs. This is clearly to be welcomed, since this is the first hurdle that has to be passed by parents of children with special needs. It is an assessment of what services will be needed to give the child the best possible services in order to give them a good start in life. Unfortunately there is no requirement to actually give children access to these services, and that is where the biggest backlog is, and this backlog has grown exponential during the Minister’s reign. In October 2020 the Ombudsman for Children published a report called ‘Unmet Needs’ describing the shortcomings of the present system, fairly scathing about the State’s attitude to provide services to children with special needs.

 In December 2020 Gareth Noble, a well known lawyer within the disability services, speaking before Joint Oireachtas Committee on Children, Disability, Equality and Integration "It is a national scandal that 91% of children do not receive their assessments within the time frame prescribed and mandated by law’’. But instead the government, under this Minister, pulled most therapists working for them out of their work to instead work in the contact tracing. This shows very clearly to me at least the priorities of this Minister. 

Not mentioned in this article is the Minister’s attitude to carers and vaccinations. He has refused to name family carers as a separate group, worthy of vaccination. Instead he say: Family carers are a diverse group, therefore, each individual will be vaccinated in the group that is appropriate to them. Well, any group is diverse, it is the foundation of our view of humanity that we are all different! Over 85s is a diverse group, nurses are a diverse groups, Ministers are a diverse group even! It is a nonsensical comment that seems designed to hide the Minister’s lack of understanding of what family carers are and do. At an earlier date he mentioned that the people we care for will be vaccinated, so we don’t have to be. That completely ignores the fact that not all family carers care for elderly people. Some of us care for children, and vaccines have not been approved for children. Others care for people with severe and profound disabilities and many of them may not be able to ever have a vaccine.

What carers want and needs, is recognition as vital workers in the present-day Health service. Instead we are treated as expendable resources that can be ignored and abused!