I concur with previous speakers in commending the emergency services for tackling the fire in Ballymun which, thankfully, did not lead to a loss of life.

I will speak about elder care or, I should say, the complete lack of it throughout the country, including the constituency I represent, Cork South-West. The elderly built this country. Now, when they need help from the State, they have to fight every inch of the way to receive care. Proof of this is the way the Government stands idly by as hundreds of the elderly are forced to travel to Belfast for cataract operations. For them, it is simply a case of travel Belfast or go blind. That is just one issue. Elder care services needs to be scrutinised by all of us in the Dáil. Years of empty promises have yielded nothing. The home help service being delivered is as bad as it was two years ago when I first raised the issue with the then Taoiseach, Deputy Enda Kenny, who said the Government would turn things around. Home helps go beyond the call of duty, but the joy they get from their jobs is diminishing quickly as visits are cut to 30 and 45 minutes, which means that they are in and out the door, thus preventing them from providing the necessary care and giving the eldery person the attention and respect he or she deserves. In many cases, home helps who have voluntarily done hours of extra work for the person receiving the service are being refused extra hours by the HSE, while it funds many private companies with questionable guidelines which have taken on staff from all over the world.

In the programme for Government, it was recognised that home help should be increased to seven days per week to include weekends and bank holidays where possible. According to what families have been telling me, though, that is not the reality in my constituency. Many elderly people have been forced into long-term care and put through the so-called fair deal scheme, which robs them of their savings, homes and, in many cases, burial money.

More than 55,000 people have been diagnosed with dementia, 4,000 of whom are in County Cork. Many of these are looked after in their own homes by members of their families. There are a number of Alzheimer's patients whose behaviour is challenging, but neither the community hospitals nor nursing homes have the staffing or resources to provide respite care for them, leaving exhausted families to care for them. There are only two dedicated respite beds for these challenging patients in the entirety of west Cork, those being in Clonakilty Community Hospital, which can largely only service the Clonakilty area. West Cork has the largest elderly population, as shown in the census statistics.

I call on the Tánaiste to set in motion immediately a study to provide extra respite beds in community hospitals and nursing homes across west Cork for patients with dementia. I also call on him to instruct the HSE to start investing proper resources in the excellent home help service that is in place on the ground and whose carers have saved the State millions of euro over the years with little thanks. He should examine the issue of the respite service for the elderly in west Cork, which has been non-existent in many cases. Elderly care in west Cork leaves much to be desired.

There were a lot of questions there, so let me try to revert with answers on some of them. The Deputy has raised the cataracts issue with me in the House previously. I am sure that he has raised it with the Taoiseach as well. The National Treatment Purchase Fund, NTPF, is about trying to get operations done for people - maybe not locally, but certainly on this island - to ensure that we can deal with backlogs. The February NTPF figure confirms that the number of patients waiting for inpatient or day case procedures is down 1,165-----

All done in the North.

-----from the previous month and 4,764 from the same period last year. It is taking effect and making a difference. It is having an impact on procedures, with which we are familiar. Between July 2017 and the end of last year, there was a reduction of more than 2,000 people waiting for cataract appointments, 200 fewer people waiting for hip operations and a series of other improvements in terms of knees, tonsils, gall bladders and so on. We are not claiming that the job is done, but significant progress is being made.

Budget 2018 allocated an additional €18 million to home support services. The additional resources have brought the resources for the direct provision of home support services to €408 million, delivering more than 17 million home support hours to approximately 50,000 people, many of them in west Cork. This is an increase on last year's figure. In addition, 235 intensive home care packages will provide 360,000 home support hours for people with complex needs, some of whom are also in west Cork.

I hear what the Deputy is saying on behalf of his constituents but, now that we can afford to spend significantly more money, we as a Government are responding by way of home help, home care, increasing the carer's allowance and pensions, and a series of other measures through which we are respecting and supporting elderly people living at home. However, it takes time to make significant differences, particularly in terms of waiting lists and putting localised services in place that people can access. In the meantime, considerable progress has been made through the NTPF.

I thank the Tánaiste for his reply. He mentioned numbers dropping, but they are dropping because people are going to Belfast as quickly as they can for operations that should be carried out locally. He also referred to cataract operations. Those should be taking place in Bantry, Mallow and elsewhere in west Cork. They are 20 minute procedures. The Government has failed in its duty to look after our elderly. It will let them go blind before it will look after them.

The Tánaiste stated that money was being invested in elder care, but I question that. The simplest way of approaching this is by speaking to those who need that care. I will outline a sample of the crisis that we are experiencing in west Cork. Last night, I spoke to someone from the Bandon-Kinsale area, one of whose parents was suffering severe dementia. She has been trying in recent weeks to get long-term care for her loved one, but no beds are available. In Skibbereen, another person who is desperately seeking respite care for a family member with dementia has been unable to do so, as community hospitals are not equipped to take such patients. An elderly lady who looks after two elderly family members in their homes in Skibbereen and Bantry needs extra home help for just one day per week to go shopping, but she has been refused it. The stunning new Bandon Community Hospital opened just a few short weeks ago, but while those essential works were under way for up to a year and a half, the family of a lady of 90 years of age could not get respite care. Now her family members hear that there were 12 to 14 beds available in Clonakilty Community Hospital that are currently being designated as step-down beds.

Time, Deputy.

This is not made up. This is the reality on the ground for our elderly, who feel let down by the State.

I thank the Deputy. The Tánaiste to respond.

I am glad that the Deputy referred to a brand new hospital in Bandon. Indeed, other hospitals will be funded under the new capital programmes that we announced a few weeks ago, some of them in Cork. There are constant challenges to improving health care provision and infrastructure throughout the country. We have just come through-----

Mismanagement.

-----what was virtually a ten-year period of capital underinvestment in health care. We are now making up for that and will spend significant amounts of capital on health care infrastructure and provision in the coming years. In the meantime, most in the House would accept that, while people are not getting locally some of the complex operations they need, they are able to access those operations under the NTPF instead of staying on waiting lists for years.

This is a process of incremental improvement year-on-year as the Government spends more and insists on better management and more efficiency to ensure that, regardless of whether people live on the Beara Peninsula or in Dublin city centre, they can access the services they need, especially if they are elderly persons who need the State's support through health care facilities.