Parliamentary health committee hears warnings of system failure as population over 65 set to exceed one million by 2030
Ireland is sleepwalking into an elder care catastrophe, with long-term residential care already costing the state up to €1.2 billion a year and demand for nursing home places projected to grow by 80 per cent by 2040, a parliamentary committee was told last Wednesday, June 10.
The Irish parliament’s Joint Committee on Health heard expert testimony that the state’s near-total reliance on nursing homes – the most expensive and, for most older people, the least preferred form of care – was producing poor outcomes for individuals and mounting financial liability for the exchequer, while a promised statutory right to home care, first committed to in 2017, remains undelivered almost a decade later.
Structural reform needed
Seán Moynihan, chief executive of ALONE, the charity supporting older people, told the committee that Ireland currently spends up to €1.2 billion annually on long-term residential care, a figure that will escalate sharply. Without structural reform, he said, the state would need approximately 800 additional nursing home units per year to keep pace with demographic demand – units that nobody wants to build, few want to pay for, and most older people do not want to live in.
