Most of the 600 mentally handicapped people who were on waiting lists for residential places at the start of the decade are still waiting, a family group said yesterday.

In the meantime, the numbers on the waiting list have grown to 1,673, according to Ms Karen Canning of the National Parents' and Siblings' Alliance.

The alliance is campaigning for an investment of £75 million over two years which, it said, would clear the waiting lists for residential places and day services which provide education, training and therapy. It said it would cost just over 1p out of every £10 of income generated in the State.

"There are no places until both parents die," Ms Canning said of the residential waiting lists.

Mr Seamus Greene said parents aged in their 80s looked after adult children in their mid-50s.

"You would think that at that age your job should be to look after yourself," he said. "The only serious hope these parents have of solving the difficulty is by dying."

They did not know whether, after their deaths, their son or daughter would go into a residential home or an institution such as a psychiatric hospital.

He asked his listeners to picture going into an institution, sleeping in a room with 30 beds and lockers and nothing else, and spending most of the day in another room with the same 30 people.

"You do that for the rest of your life. You don't go anywhere again. They took lions out of cages in the zoos because it made them neurotic," he said, adding it has the same effect on people, who are then put on medication.

New residential places have become available over the years but have frequently been taken up by people in emergencies such as the death of parent, he said. This meant people with a parent stayed on the waiting list.

An additional problem, he said, was that the Government assumed the capital cost of a residential place to be about £25,000, an inadequate amount for those with the greatest needs.

As well as the 1,673 residential places needed, 952 people were waiting for day services. The 1990 figure was 1,000.

The alliance is made up of parents' and siblings' groups from all over the State.