Medical Aids and Appliances
Dail Éireann — 2026-01-15
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Conor D. McGuinness (SF), Waterford

Last January, Storm Éowyn exposed serious weaknesses in how the State protected older people and sustained rural communities. In many rural areas, the loss of power and connectivity carried consequences far beyond inconvenience and unpleasantness. For elderly people living alone, often at a distance from family and neighbours, pendant alarms and home-monitoring systems are a vital safety net. Those systems exist precisely because Government cuts and neglect mean Garda and ambulance response times are too long and there is a dearth of public services in rural communities. When connectivity fails, that safety net all but disappears. What happened during Storm Éowyn and in subsequent weeks followed a well-worn pattern. Large numbers of older people remain dependent on copper landline-based alarm systems, even in areas where fibre broadband is available. These systems are more vulnerable to storm damage, harder to repair and, in most cases, operate without any mobile network backup. When overhead lines go down, the alarm systems go down with them. Alongside this, local community and voluntary organisations are carrying a growing burden. They manage alert systems, support vulnerable residents and step in during emergencies, often with limited funding and capacity.
Demand continues to rise as our population ages, yet funding and supports have not kept pace. If the Government is serious about the future of rural communities, practical steps are required. Communities must be supported to move away from copper-dependent alarms to modern devices with mobile backup, and monitoring systems need to work properly with fibre where it is available. Providers in the State must also be equipped to deploy mobile-enabled alarms quickly after major storms.
Rural communities are being asked to live with higher risk, weaker services and slower responses. That needs to stop and they need to be listened to. We need to see this becoming a matter of political priority and older people taken out of harm's way, this issue being recognised and action being taken.

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Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-01-15/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:30+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-01-15