Sir, – Johanne Powell, who featured in Rosita Boland's article "I don't want to do this any more" (November 19th), has to be commended for her bravery and honesty in describing the lived experience of carers in Ireland today.
Her story resonates in so many ways with our own, and I am sure with those of thousands of others across the country. Ms Powell, in describing the crippling impact that full-time care has on the lives of carers, has opened up a conversation long in need of expression.
Carers need to be released from the shackles of being labelled as “saints” and allowed to be just human. It is just this type of labelling that permits society to avert their eyes from the spectre of inconvenient truths.
The National Intellectual Disability Database, maintained by the Health Research Board, highlights a disturbing lack of any inroad into the proportion of adults with intellectual disabilities with an immediate or expected need for a full-time residential place – 1,711 adults in 2000 rising to 2,167 in 2015.
Why is it acceptable to leave up to 2,000 people, their carers, and their families, carrying a burden beyond anything that would otherwise be seen as acceptable in other spheres?
Some carers and their adult children are left waiting in a state of continuous anxiety and stress for years.
The price is not only borne by them personally and their adult child with a disability, but all family members whose lives are compromised by the continuing burden of decades of unrelenting care.
We love all of our sons and daughters equally, all are precious to us, and we want to care for them, and this includes supporting them to access a residential place, a home that will be theirs when we are gone, a home that will let them take their place in society, but not only when the carers can no longer go on caring, are spent, and are exhausted. It is not acceptable, by default or otherwise, to have such love exploited. – Yours, etc,
FRANK CONATY,
PATRICIA LALLY,
Kilcolgan,
Co Galway.