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"Caught in the Web" (07.02.2012)

Address by Emily O'Reilly, Ombudsman at Older and Bolder

I'd like to begin by thanking you for the invitation to be here this afternoon and to congratulate you on the work done by everyone involved with this report.

I happened to be thinking about it a few weeks ago when I was visiting my 85 year old mother and by sheer coincidence she asked me on that day how did one go about paying the Household Charge.

My mother is an older and bolder woman who quite probably knows more about what's going on in the world than her Ombudsman daughter as she is one of those people who actually reads things like planning applications and the minutiae of commercial court rulings when they popup in her newspaper. Some months ago, at a routine medical review in hospital, and as they were carrying out a standard cognitive test on her, my Mum had to put aside the Irish Times crossword and the latest edition of Phoenix magazine in order to let the Doctor know what day of the week it was and who the Taoiseach is.

So, my mother, despite being in that cross over category between older older and very old, is not restricted in engaging with the world by any lack of cognitive function. But she's not as mobile as she used to be, she doesn't drive and, like many of her generation she does not have a computer or internet access. She does her bank dealings in person and, if she has to, gets herself by bus to the local revenue office or Local Authority office to carry out any bit of business she has to do. E Banking and E Government and my Mum have yet to meet up for a chat.

So, when she asked me about the Household Charge I had to confess that I wasn't quite sure myself how one goes about paying it. Does a letter come in the post? Are forms handed out in the Post Office or the Garda Station or a Citizen's Advice Centre? I couldn't even recall an ad campaign to alert people. Perhaps there has been, but if so it had passed the pair of us by.

So I told her I'd look into it and of course, once back on the computer, every piece of information I needed was there. The big push is, of course, to get everyone to pay on line and I can perfectly understand the reasons for that. However, one had to delve rather deeply into the fine print to find out where to go and what to do if you don't have access to the internet. You can get a form at your local council office but it wasn't clear to me whether you could ring and get one posted out although presumably you could.

So yesterday, I asked Mum again if she had advanced things in relation to the charge. She said that she had heard you could pay it at the council office. And how did she know that, I asked. A friend, she said, who is a member of a local Senior Citizens group had been told about it by the leader of the group and he had got a form from the council and photocopied it for everybody else. So yesterday afternoon, my mother, as part of my research for today, rang the local office and a very nice woman explained everything to her and promised to send out the form.

Now I could also of course, process my mother's charge and no doubt this will be done by other families on their relatives' behalf as well. Yet there must be many older people either oblivious to the charge because they don't take much interest in media or can't take much interest in media, or who don't have relatives who are going to take up the slack. And in those cases, situations will arise where people could be penalised financially for not having registered and paid.

And that particular narrative precisely dovetails with the narrative that unfolds in this report, older people at times dependent on word of mouth or serendipity to find out about services or charges, often left at the end of a communication chain when those more physically engaged with the world and particularly with the world of the internet can access their informational needs at the click of a mouse.

The personal histories attest in many cases to bureaucracy comprised of independent republics that don't appear to connect with each other - the recent saga of the Revenue and the Department of Social Protection was a case in point - where services are so fragmented that it is often difficult to know even where to approach in order to access them and where, at its least benign, the system almost conspires to prevent people knowing what they are entitled to.

One woman interviewed for the report summed this up very well. Norah had felt the cold very much last winter for obvious reasons but became aware of insulation grants only after a chance meeting by her brother with a clued in local man in the neighbourhood park.

Norah says, "Well I suppose it's like the thing now with insulating the loft. I mean I read the paper from cover to cover every day and I know everything that's going on but nobody really tells you that these things are available and its only when quite by chance you might hear somebody say 'oh I've had so and so done' but all this information isn't given to you. I think when you're this age and you're a pensioner and you're drawing a Contributory State Pension, I think all these things, it would be very, very easy for them to send you out a pamphlet now and again and say this is what you're entitled to."

The report is replete with similar stories, of older people struggling to cope with stairs long after their hips and knees have given up the ghost and not being made aware of the grants they could get to adapt their homes appropriately. Or of others, too timid or fearful of asking for entitlements in case that interfered with what they already had. Although I should also say, that there are many words of praise for many of the services and for the service providers once the battle had been won to get them.

I am aware that it is not always easy to get your message out precisely to the people who need it. I am aware of pockets of ignorance about my own service and that we constantly strive to get to those people who might most be in need of our help. Indeed, many of the people instanced here, could have had their struggles alleviated to some degree if they had known to access my Office and that is a lesson that I shall certainly take from this initiative.

But we must also remember that we are not dealing in this country with an overwhelming tide of humanity. We are a small country with a small population and it should be no great thing to make sure that everybody who needs to access a public service can do so in a timely, efficient way and in a way that does not cause stress and anxiety. The report draws attention to the people who do help many older people to access their entitlements chief among them family members and indeed public representatives but the service providers themselves should not assume that the hand of God will guide someone to them and they should instead proactively look to ways to extend their reach.

Older people, even those who live alone, do have contact points. It could be the local Church or Community Centre, the public health nurse, the Doctor's surgery, the Post Office, the library. Public Services need to tap into all those contacts to ensure maximum reach. The next time they wish to roll out an initiative such as a Household Charge or an Insulation Grant or whatever, they should brainstorm to imagine the remotest person from their grasp and work out how that person could be included within their reach. In my mother's case, a form delivered through the letter box, without her having to ask for it would do the job. It seems unfair that I can spend five minutes on a a computer in a nice warm room and get the job done, while someone else, unclear about what to do, might have journeyed to the local authority office, at the coldest time of the year, to find out what.

I also think, that what people, and not just older people need in these times are clarity and honesty. Honesty about their chances of getting a service and clarity about what that service will provide and whether or not they might qualify for it. There has been a great deal of anxiety recently about delays in Medical Card provision and renewal. I don't know why these are happening but the delays have provoked fear and suspicion among many of those alarmed by their failure to get the card and that is an added anxiety that people on the margins do not need. People can cope if there is certainty even if the certainty means that they're not actually going to get something. Uncertainty breeds stress and anxiety and public bodies have an ethical obligation to be as honest and as upfront with people as they can be even if the honest news they have to impart isn't necessarily good news. Rationing by stealth should be avoided at all costs.

Last year, similar anxieties were provoked when it appeared that the money funding the so called Fair Deal nursing home support scheme was running out. There were rumours that health officials had been told not to tell people about Fair Deal to keep the numbers applying down. There was no evidence that this was the case, but the delays in the process again caused understandable anxieties to older people in need of care and to their families.

I fully appreciate the burdens being placed on public services at this time. Some delays have been caused because it takes some time for a system that functioned happily in the good times to get geared up for the bad and for the huge influx of new people seeking help. But I firmly believe that people, even in extremis, can cope with all of that if they are given clear, honest, factual information about where they stand. There is an understandable temptation to spin the best narrative possible when public bodies realise that the cupboard is pretty bare, but in this country, at this time, the people deserve the plain, unspun truth and that costs nothing.

This report is an important vehicle for the refocusing of attention of what really matters when the chips are down. In my work, so many complaints arise from the simple failure of communication. As we age, at times, the links that bound us tightly and expansively with the wider world begin to weaken and it is never more so than at this time that the outside world needs to reach out and yank us back in. I hope that all public bodies will heed the lessons contained in this piece of work.

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