Pensions Crisis. Falling House Prices. And You Cant Even Rely on Your Children

By Nell McCafferty

IN LESS than three years, Ill get the free bus pass, free train t i c k e t , f r e e TV licence, and an old-age pension. Ive already got the f r e e library card and loads of lovely books.

The grey hair already does me a power of good. On the crowded Luas last Saturday afternoon a man stood up and gave me his seat and when I got to the cinema in Dundrum, I was offered reduced admission for seniors.

Reader, I cheated and took it and saved myself e2. Thatll teach those young ones to treat me like an oul one.

The movie was bliss. How About You, based on a short story by Maeve Binchy, features four oul ones in a nursing home.

If I am to believe what I saw, I will live in a magnificent, converted stately mansion, have breakfast delivered to my room, lunch at a table set with linen and crystal, then go down the pub and play pool with Brenda Fricker and sing torch songs with Vanessa Red-grave. A totally cool young nurse, who knows I am a child of the fabled Sixties, will slip me the odd joint.

I will be allowed to keep, and drink, booze in my splendid bedroom, I will not be punished for swearing like a trooper, and I will be given a sleeping pill every night if want one.

C r u c i a l l y, I w i l l not b e disabled, or drooling, or demented, and nor will Brenda or Vanessa or the other two residents.

How about that? I left the cinema smiling. Bring it on, I said to myself. Let the rest of ye work, Ive done my time.

Then the Pensions Board and Money Advice and Budgeting Service rained on my parade. One in four pensioners will spend retirement in poverty, because they have made no provision for a private pension.

If they have to rely on the State pension, theyll never see Lanzarote again.

And Brenda Fricker says she dreads old age because shes just been diagnosed with diabetes.

I clutched my quadruple bypassed heart and got real; in far too many nursing homes, as recent horror stories have revealed, they greet you coming in the door with a slap in the face; in the best of nursing homes, there are few Frickers and Redgraves, if any at all.

EVER the optimist, I had another look at plan B. Alas, Plan B fell apart while I was at the pictures last Saturday afternoon.

House prices had fallen so far that day that Id be lucky to sell my house to Seniors Money and get a lump sum thats just about enough to pay for one last-ever week in Lanzarote, and repair the roof. The way house prices are still going down, I will be reduced, by the age of 67, to a CIE day trip to Wicklow, bringing my own sandwiches.

It would make you cry, so it would, and already I am hearing women my own age wax nostalgic for the good old days, (in the famous Sixties) when daughters and sons would never see their elderly parents stuck for the few bob. True as that might be, there were about ten children per family in the good old days, so they could spread the financial burden of supporting their parents.

Women and men of my age, thanks to the successful fight for contraception in the 1970s, have produced two children per family who are already up to their eyes in negative equity. Therell be few enough bob from that quarter.

Sisters and brothers of the Grey Panterhood, we took aim at the womb and shot ourselves in the foot. Who knew?

Anyway, thats a load of guffabout support from the children and the community in the recent rare oul times. What support? They only had to look after their parents for a couple of years and then they died. The old died young then, around the age of 70.

Todays young adults are facing a far heavier load. Thanks to the health service, parents can expect to live until theyre at least 80 and an increasing number are seeing 90-plus. (Will the health service ever get anything right?)

My own mother was 94 when she died, by which time I was 60, and I had a heart attack at 61 looking after her four days a week, 24 hours a day, for several years, took its toll. Im glad I did it, because I liked her, but part of the reason I did it was an irrational sense of guilt. How could you abandon your mother, was the question embedded in the DNA of my generation? Also, I didnt expect her to live so long. She wasnt too happy about that situation either her failing, aching body was a torture to her.

THERE were nights when we both prayed for her death, though we never told each other that. She would mention to me that she wished she was dead, I would pretend to be sad about that, and both of us knew I was lying.

Being ill and 94 and dependent is hard. Being 60 and depended upon 24 a day, all dreams of freedom busted, is hard.

I will not dwell here upon young parents who face a lifetime of rearing a disabled child. That is a whole other story. Suffice to say that, among other things, no amount of money would entice me to take on the job of Minister for Health and I am delighted to be a relatively healthy orphan, with no healthy children bringing their marital breakdown problems in my front door. Back to the future, dear readers. What is to be done about pensioners, such as I will soon be, who will inevitably face old creaking bones and a certain amount of dependency?

My generation are pioneers in this department. We are the first to have gone through the horror and guilt of seeing many of our increasingly long-lived but frail parents go into nursing homes.

We now have to face that future ourselves, or face the alternative of lives of quiet desperation and comparative poverty, alone in our homes.

The good old days of community are gone and that is partly because we deliberately got rid of it tell the truth now, do you really want neighbours coming in morning, noon and night? Do you really want to go back to so-called close-knit families sleeping four in a bed, in the bedroom? Are you really looking forward to Christmas with your elderly parents, when everybody else is swinging from a chandelier in New York? Pooh-bah to Charles Dickens and his warm-hearted tales of times past as Oscar Wilde said: It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of little Nell. The future can be golden enough if my generation takes action now to arrange it to our liking. We can, if we organise, have nursing homes that look like the one in How About You, and are run like that one. (Bags I Brenda Fricker as the resident in mine.) We can arrange handsome State subsidies from our tax-paying children who will be happy to pay well over the odds to be shot of us.

We can build sheltered housing in every parish in the land for those of us who are still alert enough to count out and tell the difference between the blue pills and the white ones. We can abolish Golden years: Can old age live up to the expectations raised by Hollywood in such films as Cocoon?

stamp duty for pensioners who wish to trade down to bungalows.

We can index-link the annual guaranteed rise in State pensions.

WE can build a hospice in every parish the hell with excellence, let me die in peace, bring on the morphine.

We can thank Christ that we do not face the awful fate of every girl-child born this very day research at Trinity College has calculated that these babies have a 50-50 chance of living to the age of 100.

Imagine that now theyre not 24 hours old and already theyre condemned to being hated by their own children who will be stuck with looking after them in 2107. (Unless, that is, the centres of excellence that are about to spring up all over the place keep a spring in the step of centenarians, which is unlikely, since Mary Harney will be pushing up daisies by then.) Finally, we can adopt plan B as our fall-back position we can legalise State-assisted euthanasia (relatives are wimps and wouldnt have the moral courage to administer the overdose).

There are those who will say: Nonsense, just as there were those who said: Nonsense when old-age pensions were suggested less than a century ago, and those who said: Immoral when we demanded in 1971 that contraception be legalised. The hell with it old age is not for wimps.

The great look great only because we are lying on the floor pressing the Age Alert button. Let us arise while we can still get upon our own two knees

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