Home Truths: Audrey Leary (87) was able to attend her granddaughter's wedding last month. "We didn't know if she would be able to until that morning," smiles her son, Derek.
"But her carer called me in the morning and said it was 'all systems go', she'd be there. As my daughter was walking down the aisle she stopped where her grandmother was and acknowledged her with a smile. It was lovely - a special moment."
He doesn't think Audrey would have been able to get there if she had been in a nursing home.
"I think it would have been too much effort really for a home, to get her ready and there and back again."
In the advanced stages of dementia, blind, and in need of 24-hour care, Audrey lives in the small house she bought 10 years ago after the death of her husband. Her home is a two-bedroom bungalow in a quiet cul-de-sac in Glenageary.
She was "able to manage fine at first", says Derek, but in recent years she became more dependent, physically and emotionally, on having people around.
"There would be 10 to 15 calls a day 'for a chat'. And her eyesight deteriorated so she had to give up reading and knitting."
He was dropping in up to four times a day, making sure there was an evening meal and putting out her medication. "But then every time I'd go to leave she'd say, 'Ah, you're not going'. There was constant guilt, frustration, worry."
He and his wife first came across the carer agency, Sharing The Caring, through the Blackrock Clinic. His mother now has 24-hour care, in three shifts, with one primary carer.
The rates, depending on the level of dependency, are about €8 per hour, more for weekends, with overnight rates between €40 and €51 a night.
"They make her meals, make sure she's getting her medication, give her proper bed baths twice a day and they are very kind companions. My mother is a very religious woman and one reads the Bible to her, they put on music for her and generally keep the house spotless."
Describing the care, and the peace of mind it gives him and his family, as "absolutely wonderful", Derek says he has no doubt that were it not for the carers' work his mother would be neither as content nor as healthy as she is.
And though he agrees nursing home care can be wonderful and vital for others, for his mother being in her own home allows a sense of self determination. "She can eat when she wants, and what she wants." He says it is "a huge relief" that he has not had to place her in a nursing home. The family gets no help from the State and were it not for the proceeds from the sale of the family home and some bonds held by his late father "this would not have happened," he says.