Sometimes this government makes me sick. Like this morning, when I read that for the want of the miserable sum of €60,000 a year, a community car scheme which brought elderly people living in Leitrim to vital medical appointments is being scrapped.
Marese McDonagh writes in the Irish Times today that a door-to-door car scheme, which was manned by volunteer drivers, brought over 600 people to hospital and other medical appointments since March 2022.
Tony Fahy (71) from Carrigallen, Co Leitrim, says as both his legs are “banjaxed” when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer earlier this year he would not have made it to Galway for life-saving radiotherapy without the local community car scheme. The project has recently shut down due to lack of funding.
Kathleen Jennings (82), who lives near Rooskey, is also worried about what will happen the next time she has a medical appointment. She used the service about 10 times, mostly to Dublin where she had back surgery last year to counter the “constant pain”.
“I don’t have any family and I live alone. I really was desperate for help, and I don’t know what I would have done without it. The drivers were wonderful. I am not good at travelling on my own on the train. I am nervous and I am too feeble”.
Obviously the scheme was a tremendous idea. At a time when everyone is lamenting the fall in volunteerism and the decline of rural Ireland, the people in Leitrim took the lead and followed through with it.
It is both heartening and inspiring to see that so many locals had the decency and generosity to volunteer their time to help some of the most vulnerable people in their community. 35 people in Leitrim signed up to help their neighbours in this way, most likely bringing company and some comfort to older people who can find medical appointments difficult and worrying. All the volunteer drivers who were trained and Garda vetted.
It also speaks to an approach underpinning the practical and measurable initiatives that can be taken to strengthen communities and ensure elderly people in rural receive the care they need.
And it almost beggars belief that that just eighteen months later the successful, essential, and likely life-saving, volunteer scheme must be wound up because of a lack of funds.
Apparently the project was only made possible because of local fundraising and small donations from some of those using the service to cover the direct costs of fuel and parking.
They weren’t looking for a lot of money: “A full-time coordinator combined with meeting the cost of the drivers’ expenses would cost an estimated €60,000 a year,” they told the Irish Times.
That’s €60,000 to cover the administration staff cost and also to pay for petrol and parking, but most of all to make sure that vulnerable older people can get to appointments safely and on time.
In the larger scheme of things €60,000 is a tiny sum. RTÉ would likely have spend it on flip-flops and a think-in to decide on how to spend the licence fee. But we can’t find that spare change from a budget of €14 billion for old and frail people, who have most likely lived here all of their lives, worked hard and paid their taxes, and now can’t get to the medical appointments for cancer care or essential surgery.
It’s a bloody disgrace, and its symptomatic of how low down on the list of this government’s priorities our own elderly are, especially those who live in rural areas.
They are already contending with a lack of local services – forced to travel long distances for care because of the insistence in closing rural hospitals – and on waiting lists to get a bit of home help to make possible to continue living at home. They are also dealing with the fear and anxiety caused by lowlifes who target older people living in remote rural areas.
And cancelling the service makes no sense from a cost-saving point of view. Missed appointments cost the HSE money, and ambulance services are already struggling to meet their current needs. Plus if older people can’t get medical care when living in their own homes, they are more likely to end up in nursing homes which is a sub-optimal outcome both for them and for the bean counters keeping an eye on costs.
That’s before we even get to the factor that nursing homes around the country are closing down and that everyone is busy ignoring the fact that our population is ageing at the rate of knots.
But refusing Leitrim volunteers sixty miserable grand a year to help the elderly also underlines where the priorities of this government actually lie. While we’d do well to treat with caution Sinn Féin’s promises of an abundance for cash (from the magic money tree apparently) to fund everyone and everything, the truth is that of course the government has €60,000 for schemes like this, but they are choosing to spend it elsewhere.
In May, for example, Minister of State Joe O’Brien, announced that community projects across the country were to receive €509,415 to help them “play a greater role in welcoming and integrating migrants and refugees”.
Separately, €1.04m was allocated for Diversity and Inclusion in Sport – while Screen Ireland was allocated “a further €300,000 for it’s Pathways Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Fund for 2023.
There’s almost €200,000 for a scheme to increase female representation in elections. As Matt Treacy showed, it was mightily easy for an NGO whose founder seemed to have faked his educational qualifications to garner €300,000 in taxpayer funding once it claimed to be about diversity and empowerment.
These are just some examples. The truth is that the government has endless cash when it comes to its own pet projects, throwing millions to NGOs for ‘inclusion’ or ‘diversity’ with dubious results while old people in Leitrim can’t get €60,000 to get to essential medical appointments.
It should make us angry. We should not allow this to happen.
As Kathleen Jennings said to the Irish Times: it was not fair to make people feel as if they were begging when it comes to travelling to medical appointments.
“We have all worked for the country. We have all paid our taxes. We are entitled to everything that Dublin people and other people around the country have. We don’t have the public transport here. God forbid if I had to go to a hospital in the morning I don’t have anyone to take me”.
Can anyone at Cabinet, for God’s sake, show some common decency and give the €60,000 to restore this service by Leitrim volunteers? Or are our elderly and infirm so far down the list of priorities that we will allow this service to be scrapped?