Health (Amendment) (Home Support Providers) Bill 2025: Second Stage Seanad Éireann — 2026-06-16 ============================================================ Joanne Collins (SF), Agricultural Panel I welcome the opportunity to speak on the Bill. As my colleague Senator Tully said, we will support this on Second Stage because the private home care sector must be regulated and families deserve basic assurances of safety, standards and accountability. Supporting a Bill is not the same as applauding the Government's record on this. The legislation is necessary but it is also a stark admission of how little has been delivered and how low the Government's ambition has been and has fallen when it comes to home care. In plain language, this Bill is about regulating providers; it is not about delivering entitlements for patients. We support it because families currently rely on a patchwork system. Some receive HSE-approved and HSE-provided support, which is often rationed and insufficient. Others depend on a growing private market where standards and oversight have not always matched the vulnerability of those receiving the care. Registration, inspections, enforceable standards and accountability are the minimum that people should expect. Regulation is overdue and it is an essential part of any future statutory home care scheme. However, the problem is that the Government will undoubtedly present this as progress towards that scheme. The reality of this is very different. The current and previous programmes for Government promised a statutory home care scheme and after five years what has been delivered is a register for providers. People were led to expect something completely different and something comparable to the nursing home support scheme, namely, a pathway to universal home care that is planned, funded and delivered as part of a properly resourced public health and social care system. Instead, this Bill says nothing about access, affordability or entitlement. It risks embedding a model that is designed around private provision rather than building a genuine public capacity. Regulation is not the same thing as a statutory scheme. Regulation can help prevent poor practice and protect vulnerable people, but it does not guarantee someone will receive the hours of support they need. It does not guarantee continuity of care. It does not guarantee that an older person or a person with disability can remain safely and independently in their own home. The Bill contains no answers for the families that every day ask questions like who qualifies for support, how quickly will the support be provided, what is the maximum waiting time, how are different levels of need assessed and what happens when a family cannot afford additional care. If the Government is serious about shifting care into the community, home support cannot remain as a discretionary service. It must become a right and it must be delivered to a high standard, with a defined timeframe and supported by transparent reporting and accountability. What is needed now is the clear roadmap that we have been promised to the statutory home care scheme, with timelines, phased implementation and dedicated funding. We need a genuinely needs-based system that recognises the difference between basic home help and high-dependency care and the guarantee of access based on needs rather than availability. While we support the Bill because regulation is necessary, the Government should not confuse a regulatory register with a statutory home care scheme. Families need rights, access, affordability, and most of all, they need a Government that will listen to the actual issues rather than another promise deferred. I am from County Limerick and I will give my own example. I know how important home care is, but I also know how detrimental it is when you cannot get home care. My mother has late stage dementia. My dad minded her at home every day because he made a promise to her that he would not put her into care. He was awarded home care hours but there was nobody there to give them so now she is living long term in a respite centre. She cannot get a place in a nursing home because she walks too much with her dementia, so they will not take her in a nursing home. It is very unfair. My father is nearly 80 and he drives for an hour and 20 minutes every day just to get to see his wife for an hour. That is wrong. There is a breakdown of the system. It is just not right and it is breaking families. --- 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