BRIDGET CONNORS is at the stage in her life when her children have left home and she should be enjoying free time. Instead, she is on call 24 hours a day as a carer for her father Patrick (84) who is in a wheelchair. He has chronic arthritis and cries in the night with the pain. He cannot have the two hip replacements he needs because he has a serious heart condition so he has to live with the pain. He has also had problems with his eyes and is due to have a cataract operation this week.
Connors also cared for her mother, who had senile dementia and died in 2004. Her mother used to look in the mirror and cry because the woman she saw there was wearing her clothes.
For 22 years, Bridget took two buses from Clondalkin to Crumlin every morning to care for her parents. When her mother’s illness became too difficult to handle, she placed her in a nursing home, but she still visited up to three times a day.
“You have no idea of the guilt I felt. I used to be so stressed at her screaming: ‘I want to go home.’”
Now she’s reluctant to leave her father’s side in case he falls from his chair or needs her help in the bathroom. “He says to me: ‘I’m taking your life over.’ But what can I do?”
She would love to meet the officials in charge of carers’ benefits. “I’d love them to come here and stay two days and see what they think then. We are not scabbing off society, looking for benefits.
“People on are earning as much as we are. Carers should be classed as workers.”
She only began receiving the carers’ allowance in recent years, and she frets about her future when her father dies, as the allowance will stop. She feels she’s qualified for nothing because she has spent half of her life caring for her parents.
“I’m 50 years of age. Who’ll give me a job? I didn’t get a chance to study. I have no pension.”