Note: This article was written for the Daily Mail on 23 June, 2010
The Daughters of Charity Service for people with intellectual disability provides a critical service, not just for its service users with disabilities but for their family carers also. The Service is located in Dublin, Limerick and Roscrea in Tipperary.
The services provided, however, now face severe cutbacks with the Health Service Executive telling management that just under €6 million is to be slashed with immediate effect. If implemented, such cuts would have a devastating effect, hitting both the disabled service users and carers.
Following the dictat from the HSE, the management of the Service has written to all the families outlining the extent of the cuts proposed. Dublin is to be reduced €4 million. The HSE has ordered that staff in the capital must be cut by 56, from 1046 to 990 by the end of 2010.
The Service’s biggest centre on the Navan Road accommodates 96 service users ranging from 7 to 70 years of age. A respite facility, called Sancta Maria, meets the needs of 40 users while there are 350 who use the services daily.
Being a parent of a child with an intellectual disability can be acutely stressful. The level of care and supervision needed depends on the nature and degree of disability but often it will amount to a twenty four hour responsibility. For these parents, services that can release them for a temporary period while their children are professionally cared for, are not just an optional extra but are critical to the mental and physical health of the parents. That is why these cuts would be enormously damaging.
Debbie Larkin is a single parent whose eleven year old daughter, Danielle, is moderately intellectually disabled. The child has acute behavioural problems which necessitates constant attention from her mother. For parents like her the respite facility is crucial. Danielle attends the special school on the Navan Rd each day and one day a week goes straight from school to the respite centre. This gives Debbie a break until after school the next day.
The funding cutbacks mean that this respite will now be cut significantly. For Debbie and Danielle, this means the weekly respite would now become fortnightly or even less often than that.
It is even worse for other families.
Another proposed cut is to family support hours. This is where a professional career will come to the disabled person’s home, say at the weekend, and take the person out for several hours. This is also a crucial period of respite for the parents. This will be reduced as well.
There is more. Debbie says, “We are being asked to pay for bus transport for July, and all school social outings, and after school clubs, and August summer camp will be done away with.
“All these are essential to my daughter’s development, so are a necessity not a luxury. I am a separated mum of 2 children with no support other than what I get in St Vincent’s. These cuts will have a huge effect on us and I don’t know what we will do.”
All this amounts to a savage blow to the disabled people and their families. People who are already hard put to cope with providing very demanding care with the current levels of respite, can now find themselves on the edge.
Families are preparing to fight back and are demanding that the HSE withdraw the funding cuts. On Friday last hundreds of disabled users of St Vincent’s, their family members and members of staff brought their case onto the very busy Navan Road, marching toward the city centre before doubling back. It was obvious that their difficult situation struck a chord with very many car drivers beeping and waving in support.
On Thursday, a major public meeting is to be held in the Navan Road centre where public representatives are to be invited to state what they will do to reverse the drastic situation faced. Parents are naturally stressed and anxious and will want to hear concrete statements from representatives of the political parties in government in particular.
Just how outrageous and heartless these cuts are will be appreciated especially by anybody who knows families with a member or members with an intellectual disability and who knows the endless dedication and love of parents and siblings.
The cheerleaders for the government’s programme of savage cuts in public spending, whether in the offices of the Wall St Journal or closer to home, should be brought face to face with the real lives of those affected such as those who depend on the Daughters of Charity Service. They might reflect on their demands that the dictats of the financial markets are met so that the hedge fund sharks and predatory banks can make obscene financial killings for their shareholders on the back of the intense suffering of vulnerable people.
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