Protesters highlight the hardship Carrick-on-Suir hospital closure has caused families

The hardship families requiring respite, convalescent and palliative care for loved ones continue to experience nearly two years on from the closure of Carrick-on-Suir’s St Brigid’s District Hospital was starkly highlighted at a protest last Saturday.
The Save St Brigid’s Hospital Action Group staged a protest, attended by more than 150 people, outside the former hospital last Saturday in the run up to St Brigid’s Day to further bring attention to the impact the loss of the hospital is having on the local community.
The protest took place just over a week after the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Public Petitions decided to invite the HSE to come before it to answer questions on why St Brigid’s was closed in 2020.
And it followed a renewed call for Taoiseach Micheál Martin to meet the Save St Brigid's Action Group. The call was issued in the Dáil last week by Independent TD Mattie McGrath, one of the local politicians who attended last Saturday’s protest.
Jane Jones, one of the Save St Brigid’s Action Group members who handed over the petition to Minister of State Mary Butler last September, spoke to The Nationalist in late May last year about how important the hospital had been to her family.
She is a full-time carer who assists her elderly father, Michael, with caring for her mother, Noreen, who suffers from dementia. Up to the hospital closure, her mother spent a few weeks in St Brigid’s every year either for respite care to allow Jane and her father get a break or for convalescent care if she suffered a fall.
In the past eight months since that interview, Jane, who lives in Castle Park, Carrick has experienced mixed luck with sourcing respite care for her mother locally. Her mother spent a week in respite care at Greenhill Nursing Home in Carrick-on-Suir last June to enable Jane take her first break in over a year but when her father got very ill and was hospitalised last November, she was unable to source any respite care locally.
She recalls that when she was under severe pressure caring for both her parents following her dad’s discharge from hospital, she contacted the HSE seeking emergency respite care and left a number of messages but got no response.
She says while some respite care beds are available in local nursing homes, there are not as many as when St Brigid’s was open.
“In days gone by, I would have phoned the hospital in Clonmel and if they couldn’t get me a respite bed that day they would have got it in a few days.”
But while there are some respite care beds available in Carrick nursing homes, there is nowhere locally for people to receive palliative care in their final days since St Brigid’s Hospital closed. The loss of St Brigid’s three hospice suites is keenly felt in the local community.
Health care worker Margo Kavanagh, a founding member of the Save St Brigid’s Hospital Action Group, said the absence of the hospital really hit home to her when her father, John, was dying from cancer exactly a year ago. She recalls that her dad was in a six-bed ward at Tipperary University Hospital with just a curtain to separate him from the other patients in the ward so she and her family made the decision to bring him home to Carrick-on-Suir.
He passed away on February 27 last year, a day after returning home.
She pointed out that if the palliative care suites were still open at St Brigid’s Hospital, they would have been able to bring her dad home to Carrick-on-Suir earlier and all the palliative care facilities he required would have been on hand to him.
Instead, she recalls they had to wait a few days to get a hospital bed delivered to her dad’s home whereas all the facilities he required and nursing care would have been all on hand in St Brigid’s hospice rooms if they were still open. 
“Even my own doctor said that at least when we had St Brigid’s it would have taken a lot of stress and heartache off us and my father would have got the care he should have got and deserved to get but didn’t.
“It’s just mind-boggling that they closed the hospital when there is so much need for it.”
Margo said her uncle, Tony Harris, passed away in April, 2020 also from cancer. As St Brigid’s Hospital was re-designated as a Covid-19 step down facility that month, he spent his last days in St Theresa’s in Clogheen rather than in St Brigid’s palliative care facility near his family.
Margo highlighted that the people of Carrick-on-Suir and its surrounding communities raised thousands of euros over the years for the hospital, particularly its palliative care facilities and they were just taken away with the stroke of a pen.
Also taking part in last Saturday’s protest was Pete Smith from Faugheen, who recounted to RTÉ news the difficulties he encountered securing palliative care for his late mother Noreen Smith, who died from cancer last year.
He said his mother was cared for at St Brigid’s Hospital on two occasions when recovering from cancer treatment but when she became ill again with cancer last year the option of attending St Brigid’s was no longer there.
“She was in Clonmel hospital and they needed to move her on to hospice care and there was nothing really,” Mr Smith told RTÉ news.
“Initially they offered Clogheen, but that fell through and that was an hour away. She’d been here (St Brigid’s) twice so she knew the place very well; she knew how good it was, the hospice rooms were amazing. It was just the perfect place. But it had been taken away with the swipe of a pen, basically.
“It was a very distressing time for her as well. End of life care is a point where your mental health is so important, looking after somebody like that. We were put in a very stressful situation of trying to find somewhere.
“She was given two weeks to live and it took 10 days to find somewhere for her to go. And she went there and the following day she passed away.”

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Oireachtas committee seeks to quiz HSE on closure of Carrick-on-Suir hospital