Sir, – As someone who benefited in the past from respite services for my disabled daughter (who is now dead), it made me sad and angry to read Carl O’Brien’s report (Front Page, June 4th) on possible cuts to these services, which are still apparently seen as a frill, not a necessity. For many parents who are on duty every day, they are the condition for coping.
Disability services also need funding for respite care, particularly for those who need specialist or medical back-up.
Because of the lack of new residential places, “respite” houses are now being used for emergency residential care.
And emergencies are becoming more frequent as parents age, where a mother dies or becomes ill, or where an adult child develops challenging behaviour beyond the parent’s capacity to cope. Both parent and child deserve a secure and familiar service where needs will be met. In such circumstances, they cannot wait.
It makes me angry to find the Department of Health using its commitment to the new “individualised model” of disability services as an excuse for not providing funding for adults in such emergencies. An individualised model may provide a better service for a more able person with a disability but I have never heard of anyone from the department or the HSE stepping in with such a model in an emergency.
The family and the person’s service provider have to cobble something together, in the hope – but without any certainty – of HSE funding for that person in one, two or three years’ time.
I had thought there had been a great leap forward in how we treated people with disabilities and their families; but I fear it was only empty Celtic Tiger rhetoric and, as in the last recession, the interests of people with disabilities come well after those of bankers, senior civil servants and politicians. – Yours, etc,
Sir, – Respite is an essential support for people with disabilities and their families, yet this Government appears to think it is some kind of luxury that can be done without or bought on the cheap. The suggestion that the €1,700 respite care grant is sufficient for families to purchase respite points up the gross ignorance of those who would propose such a thing. This small grant would hardly cover two months of the basic respite needs of most families (a weekend a month and the odd day here and there). What then do they do for the rest of the year when they are at wits’ end and in need of rest? Roll over and play dead? This comes at a time when the Government has felt that it is okay to cut demographic funding to cover services for school-leavers with intellectual disabilities, on top of four years of budget cuts to the sector. This year alone there are over 700 such school-leavers with no idea of what if any of the essential services they require will be available from next month. It would appear that the Government believes that the primary responsibility for caring for people with intellectual disabilities lies with their unfortunate families and not the State. Such families caring for their adult children at home are already contributing over €100,000 in 24-hour care – and that is when a day service is available from the State; the 700 school-leavers have no guarantees of such a day service.
Caring for people with intellectual disabilities is labour intensive and exhausting; all families are asking is that the State meet them half way. Right now families are carrying the bulk of the weight and it would appear that the Government has no qualms in exploiting the love they have for their family members to heap more on top. In any measure of fairness and equity the current policy line of the Government has to change; if not, one can only conclude that the utilitarian model of defining citizenship has pride of place in Ireland. – Yours, etc,