As a nation, we look at our children and decide how much we cherish them and at our elderly and decide how well they are cared for. Old age comes to each and every one of us. The west has the highest population of elderly people per capita of the regions, with counties Leitrim and Roscommon having the highest number of people per capita with dementia in the country. In recent years, the Health Information and Quality Authority, HIQA, has visited and reported on many care homes and the Health Service Executive has given commitments to address the problems highlighted in HIQA's reports. The findings of some of HIQA reports are questionable, including, for example, the finding that not more than one person should be accommodated in a room. Some elderly people in nursing homes, which are their homes, do not have any relatives and wish to have somebody near them to talk to. That issue is one to be fought on another day and one for politicians to resolve through regulations or laws.

I welcome the recent announcement by the Minister of State at the Department of Health, Deputy Kathleen Lynch, that a funding package of €300 million will be provided for nursing homes and homes for persons with disabilities. I also welcome the announcement of a €150 million investment through public private partnerships, PPPs. I hope the new partnerships will not be similar to those used previously for medical centres as they gave builders a licence to print money. The State entered 25-year contracts that had to be renegotiated when they expired. The builders said the Government or State would pay €1 after 25 years to own the facilities.

Will the Deputy put a question, please?

In the west, we have care homes such as the community care home in Carrick-on-Shannon, Áras Mhuire in Tuam and, above all, the Sacred Heart Hospital in Roscommon which passed an inspection with flying colours in terms of the care provided by staff. Residents are happy in the home. People in Roscommon suffered a blow when the accident and emergency unit of the local hospital was closed. Politics should not be a game of leaving an elderly person of 80 or 90 years wondering whether money will be provided to allow him or her stay in a nursing home.

The Deputy is one minute over time. He must put a question.

I will ask a straight question. Will funding be provided to the Sacred Heart Hospital in Roscommon to ensure the 90 year old person to whom I spoke no longer lives in fear? The Government should not play politics by waiting for one, two or three weeks to decide when is the right time to make an announcement. Will funding be provided because the people in question do not deserve what they are going through?

Deputy Fitzmaurice raises a number of issues. He will be aware of the constraints placed on the Government in recent years in respect of the availability of money and the capacity to spend. That is the reason the public private partnership concept was brought into being and is, for example, delivering the extension of the motorway from Gort to Tuam at a cost of nearly €600 million. It is also delivering exceptionally high quality schools for children who need them at primary and secondary level, as a matter of urgency. We did not have the capacity to deal with this issue because of the state of the public finances. Changes have been brought about in the operation of public private partnerships to make them more acceptable, effective and streamlined. However, these are difficult and complex contracts. In cases where projects have been delivered under public private partnerships, they have been built on time and on budget using contracts of 25 years. People in communities where schools and so on have been provided have seen very quick results.

As the Deputy is aware, the Health Information and Quality Authority was set up as an independent authority to make unannounced visits to facilities in any location and assess their quality. HIQA has brought to light some very unsavoury practices, inferior facilities and inferior attention to elderly people. The elderly person to whom the Deputy spoke in Roscommon must be treated with the same dignity and afforded the same quality of treatment as everybody else. However, the fact is that numbers of elderly people are living in homes in which facilities are inferior. In many cases, the buildings are very old and the quality of facilities is not up to standard.

I agree with Deputy Fitzmaurice that there are some people in these homes who would like to have another person accommodated in the room. However, HIQA has raised the standards laid out for single-occupancy rooms, including in respect of access, visibility for staff and so forth. People often tell me they would love to have somebody to talk to or someone else in the room. This depends on the individual's mentality, circumstances or, perhaps, his or her condition, for example, if dementia is advanced. The Government must deal with the reports of the Health Information and Quality Authority in respect of inadequate and poor quality facilities in some homes and institutions. That is the reason the Minister of State made the reference she did.

To be honest, I will not give a definitive answer about any of the ten or 11 homes that need to be-----

Why does the Taoiseach not make another promise to people in Roscommon?

Deputy Kelleher should button it for a second. The time has expired.

I am talking about not discriminating in respect of the quality of life of elderly people living in institutions and homes which have to be repaired.

The budget is on its way and the detail regarding Deputy Fitzmaurice's request about homes that will receive direct funding will be made known at that stage. That addresses the point the Deputy raised about public private partnerships and an individual home in Roscommon, one of quite a number that features in HIQA reports pointing out the need to deal with inadequate and antiquated facilities. The level of care and attention should be the same for the person to whom Deputy Fitzmaurice spoke and everyone else. I thank him for his question.

Everyone agrees that elderly people should receive the best possible care. Two weeks ago, senior HSE officials told me the Cabinet had to meet and the HSE would shortly know the outcome of that meeting. What does "shortly" mean to a 90 year old person who looks one in the eye and asks whether a nursing home will close forcing him or her to move out? I will not tell a lie to anybody and I looked the person in question in the eye and said I would do everything possible to help. The facts are, however, that the Government has the cheque book, the figures have been done and the announcement has been made. Why keep this person waiting and wondering? Are politicians in the game of trying to shorten people's lives by causing them to feel trepidation as a result of not knowing what will happen? Why does the Government not come clean and be straight when it makes announcements? Why not state whether funding is available for a home? There is an onus on the Taoiseach to be straight and tell people in Roscommon and other areas where nursing homes are needed that the funding required is available.

Paddy wants to know.

While there is certainly nothing wrong with the Deputy's comment, the annual budget is the outcome of the decisions made by the Cabinet in respect of providing services and running individual Departments for which Ministers have responsibility. As the Deputy is aware, the Health Service Executive submits its service plan to the Minister for Health who must sign off on it before it can be delivered. This can only happen when the Cabinet has signed off on the extent of moneys allocated to each individual Department and agency. It is not possible to give the Deputy a direct answer today because decisions have not yet been made about the budget. We have set out the parameters of it - out to €1.5 billion. Ministers are looking for far more than is available but we will not go down the same road we went down before.

This causes a complication if one has ten or 11 homes that are aged in building terms and where the facilities are not up to the standard determined by HIQA. Can they all be put together? Does one have the resources to do them all together and look after all the other things that apply also? In that sense, where many of these institutions or homes have come to light in this manner, one needs to have a strategy and plan to improve them and bring them up to standard or whatever else. If they do not meet the standard, they cannot remain open. The critical issue must be to give every person in all of those homes the best level of care, attention and dignity they can have in their circumstances. I would like to think that "shortly" means what the word is supposed to mean. The budget will determine the allocation of money to each Department and the priorities that apply afterwards, but if one has 11 or 12 of these homes to do now, one must have a method, strategy and plan to upgrade them and provide the facilities that are appropriate for elderly people in these circumstances. Many of them are in places they call home but the facilities they have are not up to standard by today's terms.