I thank you, a Cheann Comhairle, for allowing me raise this issue on the Adjournment and I thank the Minister of State, Deputy O'Shea, for his attendance in the House.
Over the past number of months, the issue of rural crime against the elderly and their vulnerability has been referred to daily in newspapers and the media. Some horrific attacks have taken place which, in some instances, resulted in elderly people being killed while many other people living alone or with other elderly persons have been seriously injured. In all cases, these people have been left traumatised and in fear for the rest of their lives.
Many different solutions have been suggested, some of which must be implemented immediately — others would do nothing to eliminate such attacks. The motivation for almost all the attacks on elderly people who often live alone in remote areas, two or three miles away from their nearest neighbours, is the selfish expectation of easy pickings as it is customary for many old people, particularly those in receipt of social welfare payments, to keep amounts of cash in their homes.
The recommendations in the report presented last week to the Taoiseach by the Joint Committee on the Family, if implemented, would provide further encouragement to elderly people not to hoard cash sums in the fear of a corresponding reduction in their weekly social welfare pension.
There are currently 3,000 repair schemes in operation to refurbish houses and to ensure that the lifetime of such housing stock in rural Ireland is extended, at least for the lifetime of their elderly inhabitants. The disabled persons scheme is limited and does not fall within the terms of my Adjournment motion. The essential repairs scheme — the replacement or repair of roofs, doors and windows or dry lining — with a maximum grant of £1,800, is valuable in that it allows an elderly persons employ a contractor to carry out the work.
The housing aid for the elderly scheme, operated by health boards, is a similar scheme but the work is carried out by health boards or their agents. Both schemes are designed so that only an elderly couple over 65 years of age or, in the case of the housing aid for the elderly scheme, a person living along over 65 years of age, are eligible. As a general rule, if an elderly person has anyone under the age of 65 years living with them, it prevents that person becoming eligible for either scheme. This general rule has few exceptions.
Despite the Government giving consideration in the past number of months to the question of how to provide added protection to vulnerable elderly people, the introduction of a crime package costed at millions of pounds and reconsidering the question of giving a tax allowance, which will not work, as against a grant for the provision of an alarm system for elderly people, the greatest protection an elderly person can have, namely, a son or daughter living with them, inhibits that person availing of either house improvement grant scheme because they are not living alone.
It is not beyond the capacity of the Minister's officials to give urgent consideration to how both of these valuable schemes can be so structured as to permit, at the very minimum, a son, daughter or other category of person aged less than 65 years of age, reside with an elderly person or couple while permitting entitlement to either house improvement grant scheme. The schemes are currently so structured as to prevent any person, eldely or otherwise, who has the means to carry out the work themselves being eligible. Accordingly, I am not asking for an open ended cheque when I suggest that a person residing with an elderly person, where that person is also in receipt of a social welfare payment in addition to the old age pension coming into the household, should not prevent the activation of either scheme for the benefit of the members of that household.
Many sons and daughters in the west go to England and elsewhere for work but they often return to take over the family farm. In such cases the elderly parent often loses entitlement to a range of social welfare benefits and housing aid and, in time, that loss can become a matter of family discord or generate a feeling of discrimination in regard to how the State policy is implemented.
People will always maximise their entitlements to State benefits. One only has to consider the number of young people who leave the family home to avail of maximum unemployment assistance. Their rents are met from an increasing supplementary rent allowance bill costing millions of pounds. We must promote inter-generational solidarity and caring community support for elderly people.
I will conclude by giving an example of this. An elderly mother who was traumatised by an ugly incident which occurred late one night and who lived alone requested her son to return from England to live out the last few years of her life under the same roof. She had become fearful of living alone in a remote area and there was a possibility that she could shortly have become institutionalised. Prior to her son's arrival from England, under the housing aid for the elderly grant scheme her application for the replacement of the door and windows of her house had been approved. When the work was about to begin, the health board discovered that her son had returned from England and was living with his mother. Grant aid was subsequently withdrawn, the doors and windows still require replacement but her son, who depends on social welfare payments, cannot afford to replace them.
If that man had not come home, his elderly mother could have had her house repaired and, in due course, would probably have been the beneficiary of the home help scheme, frequent visits from the public health nurse and earlier institutionalised care in a home for the elderly, perhaps costing many thousands of pounds. The State's exposure to such costs have been minimised to an appreciable extent as a result of this man returning from England to live with his mother.
There are many hundreds of such cases but, with a little imagination and a commitment at interdepartmental level, my suggestion could result in saving a great deal of money while providing a substantial degree of additional protection to those elderly people to whom I have referred.
