The Tánaiste has often acknowledged the heavy burden that older people have borne during the Covid crisis. We saw the acute crisis in nursing homes, with many vulnerable people and many deaths there. Today, we read that one in five directors of nursing homes plans to quit. We have seen necessary care postponed for older people and isolation hollowing out their lives. Is it now time to rebalance our policy towards older people to put greater emphasis on being able to live independently? I welcome the new carers' policy, the pilot for homecare model, but we need new impetus to drive this so that coming out of Covid we have knowledge that older people need to be cared for in a different way.

It is time to do exactly that. As a Government, we want to make sure older people can live in their own homes for as long as is possible. In the past, we have a lot of additional resources into homecare for that reason. The barrier to receiving those services was a lack of finance, but it is now not a lack of finance but a shortage of homecare workers, which we are really struggling with at the moment. As a Government, we have decided to establish a commission on care. That is in the programme for Government. We were not able to get it up and running because there were a number of other commissions doing work on pensions, defence and the media, but we agreed at party leader level on Monday that we would get the commission on care established before the summer. It will be able to look at some of these issues, which I think will be very valuable.