As a 75-year-old, the most challenging aspect of ageing for John Fitzpatrick is the “confusion and mist”, he says.
“Losing your focus on things,” he reflects. “Losing your concentration ... a lot of the time, old people find it hard to speak for themselves.
“They lose track of things quite easily. Even in a conversation, they can lose track of something and get carried away. If there’s somebody close to you that knows what you need, it makes it a bit easier.”
That consideration is central to the model of Alone, the charity working with older people in Ireland, which launched its latest strategic plan in Dublin on Wednesday. Fitzpatrick was on hand to detail his experiences, as he has availed of Alone’s support services for about five years.
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Living in an apartment in the north Dublin suburb of Clontarf, he says his home is “lovely, but not terrible warm”.
“It’s comfortable, but I really would like if somebody insulated the place,” he says. “It’s one of those old apartments that was built in the 1970s.”
He has a couple of ailments, including pulmonary fibrosis which limits his breathing and affects his voice, making it feel “like you’re speaking from somewhere else other than your mouth”. But when asked about the biggest challenges he has encountered in older age, the first things that come to mind are “the confusion and the mist”.
Some of the other challenges people face, among those mentioned during the event, are insecure housing, poor health, poverty and loneliness.
After a week of disruptive fuel protests around Ireland, the Government announced a €505 million package to support hauliers and agribusinesses. Rising fuel and energy costs can have a huge impact on Ireland’s older population too, many of whom, like John, live in older buildings.
“I think energy is a bit like housing,” the charity’s chief executive Seán Moynihan said. “We sometimes leave older people out of the conversation. There are huge housing needs among the ageing population and we don’t tend to talk about that. Around energy, protest is a legitimate thing people do and obviously [people can do it] to get their economic needs met.
“That has been done, but hopefully that’s the start of a conversation. One in 10 people live in energy poverty. Twenty-five per cent of all adults in the country are in arrears on their gas bill. That is not a situation we can stop talking about.”
Alone’s model hinges on its fleet of 9,000 volunteers visiting older people and assessing where they may need help in their day-to-day lives. They may be called out to assist with loneliness, but discover that the heating in a house is not working, or that the resident is struggling to manage their grocery shopping.
“I think that’s why we exist, in some ways,” Moynihan says.
“We act as a conduit. Everything we do, every person we support, we record everything we’ve done and our engagement with Government is always based on the lived experience of real people on the ground. We back that up with the data and try to put forward evidence-based solutions.”
By the end of 2029, Alone aims to support 125,000 older people annually; it is on track to work with 52,000 this year. As of 2023, there were 806,000 people aged 65 and above in Ireland, a number expected to increase to 1.6 million in 15 years’ time.
