Shameful promise an insult to Brendan’s dad

THE only certainties in life are death and taxes as Benjamin Franklin said, summing up their power to strike terror into the heart. Whatever about the taxman, sooner or later we all must countenance the Grim Reaper and do what we can to put off his arrival. Mostly we keep the thought to the back of our minds but every so often the veil of denial is pulled apart and we are forcibly faced with our mortality and the twilight years of our existence.

Doom-laden words like nursing home, Alzheimer’s or cancer may act like triggers for filling us with dread.

Brendan Courtney’s documentary We Need To Talk About Dad – which explored the care options for Brendan’s father, Frank, who suffered a debilitating stroke – jolted us into recognising that while care of the elderly may not be a problem for us today, it certainly will be at some stage.

The Courtney family’s devotion to their dad – their sadness that he could not be cared for at home, their frustration with the complexities of the Fair Deal scheme – was played out with such emotional authenticity that it was bound to start a ‘national conversation’.

Every month, hundreds of families struggle with the same dilemma. They must decide whether keeping their mother or father at home is realistic or if a nursing home is preferable.

There is a an awful finality about nursing homes. For all their bells and whistles, their schedules of jolly excursions and beautician visits, there is no disguising that they are also holding pens between our world and the next.

When an elderly person takes up residence in Springfield or Mountpleasant, they often feel they are entering the antechamber to death. Most of us fade away faster in nursing homes, compared to home sweet home.

BRENDAN found them too depressing. His father wasn’t too keen either – like many people, Frank would rather die at home than be interred in a formal institution. But rather than treating Brendan’s documentary like one of the hundreds of letters it receives each week from desperate carers, the Government snapped into action with indecent haste. After the show aired, Brendan received a late-night press release from the Minister of State for Older People, promising to put home care for the elderly on a statutory footing similar to nursing homes.

Now, at the age of 30, Minister Helen McEntee may not know that this was policy in the Fine Gael manifesto of 2011 and that State-subsidised home care has been thrashed out many times over the years – to absolutely no avail.

If she did know, then she should be ashamed of herself for playing on a universal fear and raising false hopes among one of the most vulnerable sections of society.

For there is very little likelihood of proper home-care packages ever seeing the light of day.

In the first place how would it be funded? Nursing shifts don’t come cheap and the cost of individual round-the-clock homecare packages for the elderly would far outstrip the cost of nursing home care.

WE LIVE longer now and average life expectancy is set to increase further over the years, piling more pressure on an organisation that can’t even bring its current range of services in on budget.

Home care would cause cuts to other vital HSE services or tax hikes. Of course, the State may be able to make it more affordable through tax breaks or cost-sharing. Increasing the number of carer hours might give more choice about how we end our days. But these initiatives don’t require the consultation process promised by the minister.

Nor do they warrant the extravagant publicity she won on the back of the Courtney family’s misery.