THE Psychiatric Nurses' Association has said it is angry and disgusted at a plan to move residents from a high-support psychiatric home and use it as a methadone clinic.
It said the decision to move the residents of the Weir Home in Cork Street, Dublin, was "an act of cynical expediency". Some residents have been in the home for 15 years.
The Eastern Health Board has consistently denied that the need to provide a methadone clinic for heroin addicts was behind the move. It said it had planned to move the residents to superior accommodation before the establishment of a methadone clinic had been decided upon.
The PNA, however, claimed that the news of the move came as a shock to the management team, and that EHB staff had been "scouring the suburbs" in search of alternative accommodation.
The EHB said it had not yet decided on the locations to which the 24 people now in the home would be moved.
The PNA argued that the residents have been assimilated into the area in a near-perfect example of community care.
Many would inevitably be rehospitalised if they were removed "from neighbours who know, accept and support them from a mature and welcoming community, from shops and pubs and walks they know and are content in The move, said the PNA, could prove disastrous for many of these middle-aged men."
There was an overwhelming need for treatment facilities for drug addicts, the PNA acknowledged. However, the right to treatment by one needy group cannot be allowed to negate the rights of those who already have it, it added.