There were calls for more proactive policing of the welfare of vulnerable and elderly people last night after an inquest found that four women who died in their home in Leixlip, Co Kildare, last year had starved themselves to death.
Questions will be asked in the Dail about whether greater efforts could have been made to investigate the whereabouts of the three sisters and their aunt who were eventually found dead behind locked doors and windows at a housing estate in Leixlip. The inquest heard that a Department of Social, Community and Family Affairs inspector visited the house three times in April but could get no reply. On the last visit she squeezed a letter between the door and frame because the letter box was sealed.
The Eastern Health Board had stopped paying the women a rent allowance in March because it had not heard from them.
The inquest found they died by suicide and as a result of starvation. A note written by one of the reclusive women, Ms Ruth Mulrooney, to her sister Josephine, after 36 days of starvation, suggests they believed they would go to heaven together after they died.
The Fine Gael spokesman on health, Mr Gay Mitchell TD, is to raise the case when the Dail resumes later this month. "Elderly and vulnerable people are not being given the consideration they should and this is a broader issue which needs urgent attention," he said.
He added that it is time to consider the introduction of "proactive policing of vulnerable people". Where there are valid grounds for concern, "the public health authority should be empowered to take reasonable action to ensure a safe and caring environment is provided".
Father Patrick McHugh, a local curate, said last night the women had lived in a new community which people are still only moving into and this would have made it especially difficult for people to know something was wrong. Even in more settled communities, he said, we no longer know half our neighbours and travelling everywhere by car isolates us further from our community.
In her note, Ms Ruth Mulrooney said none of them could have thought "our deaths would be so slow and while the idea of ascending into heaven together is a good one, we did not envisage this.
"We are 36 days not eating," she wrote. She wondered if they could call out the hospice team at Harold's Cross and say she had cancer.
It would be "cruel and neglectful not to intervene."
She also left a letter for a friend, Mr Sean Doherty, saying there was no happiness here on earth. "Until we meet again, I will watch over you. Do not grieve for me."
The women had lived in Leixlip for almost two years before they died, but nobody knew them. Both there and in Sandymount where they lived previously, they appear to have been determined to remain secluded.