Expert calls on CAB to target relatives stealing from the elderly

Experts have called for the Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB) to be used against people who steal money from their elderly relatives.

A TD yesterday told the Oireachtas Health Committee that he went to the gardaí after he learned that a man with dementia had over €100,000 taken from his bank account in 12 months.

However, the gardaí told him that they couldn’t act against the man’s relative because dementia sufferers cannot give evidence in court.

Pic: Gareth Chaney/Collins

Mervyn Taylor, a board member with the Safeguarding Ireland charity, told the committee that such crimes could be tackled by the Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB).

‘CAB is one mechanism that can be looked at because the person is in receipt of the money – they have to explain how they got it,’ Mr Taylor said. ‘They still committed a crime, and that can be investigated regardless of where it came from.

‘It is the same principle as drug seizures.’ Safeguarding Ireland chair Patricia Rickard-Clarke told the Oireachtas committee that the abuse and neglect of vulnerable adults is ‘endemic’.

Pic: Leah Farrell / RollingNews.ie

‘There is culture in Irish society regarding older people,’ she said. ‘Decisions are made for them, money is taken from them, no issues are raised, and everyone turns a blind eye. There is a passive acceptance of abuse, if I can put it that way.’

According to Ms Rickard-Clarke, her organisation received daily reports of financial abuse, coercive control, self-neglect, as well as other practices which indicate ‘very serious violations of human rights’.

‘The alleged harms occur, in the main, in the community, with a significant component also relating to people in residential care,’ she said. Ms Rickard-Clarke singled out the volume of vulnerable adults who are the targets of financial abuse.

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She said that the practice ‘is widespread’, although it often goes ‘undocumented’. The committee’s vice-chair, Fine Gael TD Colm Burke, raised a case known to him of an elderly man with dementia who saw €100,000 taken from his account over 12 months.

‘When I tried to make a complaint to gardaí, I was told that An Garda Síochána could not take any action because the man would not be able to give evidence [due to his dementia]. There was clear evidence that money was taken,’ he said.

Ms Rickard-Clarke and Mr Taylor said that the example provided by Mr Burke was ‘hugely familiar’. Mr Taylor said gardaí have yet to develop a safeguarding policy for adults and ‘lack skills’ in investigating the suspected financial abuse of vulnerable people.

The discussion came in the ‘aftershock’ of a damning RTÉ investigation into nurs – ing homes operated by Emeis Ireland – which is now the subject of a Garda investigation.

Ms Rickard-Clarke said: ‘While the current focus is welcomed, it should not require an exposé to generate political and public engagement on the exploitation of adults in Ireland.’ She added that these reports ‘give only a partial insight into the extent of adult abuse’.

Caroline Walker Strong, chief operations officer of the Irish Association of Social Workers (IASW), told the committee that people in nursing homes ‘vanish’ from their community and lose the ability to advocate for themselves.

‘When people are ageing in their own communities, they are known… What we are seeing is once people go into nursing homes, they vanish from their community, and that diminishes their own voice,’ she said.

‘This should serve as a wake-up call to Ireland,’ she said. ‘Despite commitments made during Covid by our Government to downsize and decongregate large nursing homes, we continue to see planning approval for large-scale, privately run nursing homes, often built on the outskirts of towns.’

She added: ‘We recognise individual homes are providing good care, but life is about much more than receiving good care – we have to ask ourselves: who among us would like to age into our current care model? No one.’

Ms Walker Strong also called for more ‘localised’ facilities across the country. Both Safeguarding Ireland and the IASW renewed calls for the Government to progress the Adult Safeguarding Bill of 2017, ‘which could have addressed many of the issues that remain of urgent concern today’, and establish a National Adult Safeguarding Authority.