‘Disgusted over our treatment’
A SPRIGHTLY 83-year-old rally driver and driving instructor says she is ‘totally fed up and disgusted’ by the way older people have been treated during the pandemic.
Rosemary Smith said she was most angry about the prospect of a return to any kind of cocooning.
She was speaking as Taoiseach Micheál Martin said over-70s were being asked to use their individual judgment to limit their interactions to small numbers of people, for short periods, and to shop at certain designated times.
‘I am really getting to the end of my tether. I have been locked down. Then I could go out again. Then I couldn’t go back to work because you have to sit close to someone in a car, and they said that I had to be careful,’ she said.
‘Now I’m hearing that there are more restrictions on the way. I’ve done everything they asked. I have worn a mask. I have sanitised. But I feel really, really fed up… And I can’t see it ending the way people are behaving.
Ms Smith is most annoyed at young people who have taken risks by going to gastro-pubs. ‘They are being totally irresponsible,’ she said. ‘I have seen people going in and out of pubs, not wearing masks. It’s the young people, the ones who were told the virus only affected older people.’
Ms Smith added that she was excluded from the Pandemic Unemployment Payment because she is over the age of 66. She also said she had no entitlement to an Irish pension, because although she has always lived here, some of her rally driving earnings were made abroad.
‘They told me more or less to get lost, that I was too old,’ she said, recalling her application for the Covid payment. ‘I just feel it’s totally, totally unfair that youngsters who have just turned 18 and barely worked a day are given €350 a week, but I, who have represented Ireland all over the world for years, am not entitled to anything.’ Ms Smith also said she had been using her free time to create a fabulous flower garden at her home in Sandyford, Dublin.