Health (Amendment) (Home Support Providers) Bill 2025: Second Stage Seanad Éireann — 2026-06-16 ============================================================ Pauline Tully (SF), Cultural and Educational Panel Curaim fáilte roimh an Aire Stáit. I will be supporting this Bill. Who would not agree that the private home support sector should be regulated? It actually makes me shudder to think that it has not been to date and that we have no minimum standards of care when it comes to home care services. Home support workers are going into the homes of very vulnerable people, including older people living on their own, people with a disability and people who have suffered a stroke and cannot articulate or advocate for themselves. We need this legislation. Up to this point, the HSE was not even in a position to provide a list of private providers who go into the homes of vulnerable people. The legislation is long overdue and is extremely welcome. It is urgent and needs to be moved on as quickly as possible. Families and individuals deserve assurances of safety standards and accountability. The Bill allows for both the inspection of homes and enforcement, where necessary, to be carried out by the chief inspector and HIQA. Increased resources will be needed and I presume that has been factored in. We do not want to hear that HIQA and the chief inspector do not have the people on the ground to do the work that is necessary. Unfortunately, this is not the statutory home care scheme that has been identified in a number of programmes for Government. We still need to move towards such a scheme. This legislation is not about delivering entitlements for patients either and it embeds the privatisation of care. We really need to build a genuinely public health and social care system. I have spoken to the HSE in my locality because I know of lots of people who are waiting for home care. I have asked the HSE if there is a moratorium on recruitment but it tells me that there is not. There are many people working for private companies who are excellent workers and who would love to work for the HSE because the pay and conditions are much better but the HSE does not seem to be recruiting. I just do not understand it, particularly when there is a shortage of home carers. Why is the HSE not recruiting? There are over 5,000 people waiting for home care hours. Some are waiting for additional hours to the package they have because their needs have increased while for others, it is a new service. This Bill is not going to guarantee those people the hours they need. It will not guarantee them continuity of carers. Nor will it guarantee that they will be able to remain safely in their own home or be able to leave hospital or a nursing home to go home. Yesterday, I had a phone call from a woman whose mother is 97. She is living in her own home and there are carers coming in but frequently one carer cannot come. Carers are entitled to time off at weekends, for holidays or if they become ill, but there is no additional cover provided. This lady will help as much as she can and she has brothers who are brilliant and who help out, but neither the mother nor they themselves are comfortable with the personal care element. The woman and her sons have their dignity, and that has to be respected. I was talking to another woman whose husband's carer was not able to come to the house. She was asked if she had neighbours who could help. Why on earth would she do that? Her husband deserves respect. He does not want neighbours coming in to help him to shower. Another lady I spoke to is a wheelchair user. She has been a very independent lady for all of her life. She requires surgery so, for the moment, she is unable to manage. She has waited for months and finally has got some level of care but she said she is still juggling family members with the care. However, the carers are coming to her home in the evening to put her to bed at 7 p.m. This is an active lady. She is 70 years of age but she is really active and involved in lots of committees and so on. She said to the person in the HSE - because it is not the carer's fault - that she does not want to go to bed at 7 p.m. She was told that she was lucky that she was not going at 5 p.m. That is no way to treat people. That is a total lack of dignity. She inquired about a personalised package and was told that it was not available. She told them that she knew it was available to people. They asked her what age she was, and when she said she was 70, she was told that it is not available to old people. It was available to her as a disabled woman should she have needed it - which she did not but she knew of other disabled people who had accessed it - but not to her because she had aged out of the service. It was like her disability had disappeared. That is ageism. This woman is well able to manage her own affairs and would be happy to do so. Her carers are a mixture of HSE and private carers. She says there is one company from which she has not seen the same carer in the time they have been coming in. For people with dementia, that is very confusing. They need a continuity of care. Older people and vulnerable people need to get to know people as well and not feel like that they are a burden on society. While everything in this Bill is needed and needed as quickly as possible, a lot more is needed around how home care is actually provided. --- 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/seanad/2026-06-16/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:03+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-06-16