Over 1,600 older people on waiting list for home-support packages

Over 1,600 older people are on the waiting list for home-support packages.

Nearly 1,100 are in Kildare, west Wicklow or parts of west and south Dublin.

The midwest of the country’s also badly hit, but the national figure’s down from over 7,800 before the Covid-19 pandemic.

Catherine Cox, from Family Carers Ireland, says there’s an obvious reason for the drop, noting “So many families were isolating and cocooning and weren’t in a position where they would have had somebody come into their home for fear that they might actually catch the virus so I think a lot of families may have been removed from the list not because they didn’t require and don’t still require home support but maybe because of that fear”.