Dear Minister Reilly,
My name is Una Farren, I’m from Culdaff Inishowen Co.Donegal.
I was reading the article about proposed cuts in the Budget in the Irish Independent, on 23rd November 2011.
To say I’m utterly disgusted is an understatement…..Just where do you plan to put the elderly people that are living, very happily I might add, in these Nursing Homes that you plan to close?
My mother is 69, has severe Rheumatoid Arthritis, cannot even blow her own nose, has gone blind from effects of R.A.
and up until last year I was her carer for the last 10 years. Having developed R.A. myself 7 years ago and along with thE constant heavy lifting and other matters in my private life, our Public Health Nurse got my mother admitted into our local
Community Hospital in an emergency so I could have a rest for a week. Then after coming home again my mother was fine for about a week then started going downhill again and developed a cough and as she has Arthritis in her lungs I called the doctor to come out to the house as it was just too much to take her to the surgery, the doctor came down and immediately rang for an ambulance and my mother was taken up to Letterkenny Hospital to be checked out as she was on certain tablets etc…
After seeing my mother the nurse’s in Letterkenny asked us who was caring for her, I told them I was and they said she needed
full time medical care and rang our local Community Hospital and were told they had a bed the next day so we took my mother home that night and up the next day.
After that I was talking to my Public Health Nurse and she told me I was about a month away from having a mental breakdown so I was so relieved to realise that my back wasn’t going to break after all and that I didn’t need to be in the house constantly as my mother needed an eye drop every hour for the last year and a half I cared for my mother.
So in having people in Nursing Homes is taking the load off the people left to care for them, some elderly people (like my mother) need to be around constant medical care as she is always getting a flare up so what do you intend to do for people like her ?
So in order to save money your thinking of closing Nursing Homes….so what about all these ridiculous enormous pensions all these ex-ministers are getting?
For example Brian Cowen is getting €150,000 a year and as he’s only 51 he’ll get this for years to come and what did he do for us ? Well let’s see he was Minister of Health about 10 years ago..oh yeah that’s the time my mother spent a year in a wheelchair because she was waiting for a knee operation. Then he was Minister for Finance ..oh yeah that’s when he handed out too much money every year in the budget and ended up nearly bankrupting our country and THEN he gets voted into the Taoiseach’s job and turns out to be the most hated Taoiseach EVER, yeah and he’s getting ,€150,000 a year that’s so fair..
Then there’s Bertie Ahern, who’s getting €152,331 a year for also bankrupting the country and giving the property developers lots of tax breaks so they could keep on throwing up houses and flats and making lots of money.
Then there’s Mary Harney, who’s getting €129,805 a year for being completely useless, introducing the HSE who are just a crowd of suits who don’t give a toss about the sick, wrecked the health system and went on fancy trips at the tax payers expense to get her hair done.
Why are these people being paid these extravagant amount of money when the elderly are being tossed out of places they love just to save a few euro for the government ??
Are you going to line up the elderly and shoot them when they reach a certain age because what else are you going to do?
I bet you there’s not one person in government at the moment that has an elderly relative in a Nursing Home in fear of being closed or in one of the many Community Hospital’s around the country that are being threatened with closure by the wonderful HSE.
We voted Fine Gael in the last General Election because we thought it would be a new start but from what I see so far you are not much better than Fianna Fail.
Una Farren.
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