‘It’s not good enough’ – Hospice CEO

PLEA Martina Jennings, CEO of the Mayo Roscommon Hospice, is pictured at the launch of the Club Stars awards at Knockranny House Hotel, Westport last week. Pic: Michael McLaughlin

Ciara Galvin

MAYO Roscommon Hospice CEO Martina Jennings has said it is not good enough that elected representatives are standing by while the charity funds the build of its two hospices.
Speaking at the launch of the Club Stars awards, the CEO said those in DΡil Éireann should be making contact with the charity, offering assistance.
“The Mayo Hospice is now winter-proof, the build will hopefully be finished in May, it’s costing €9 million to build and possibly €6 million to build the Roscommon Hospice, which will be starting next year. All of that money is coming from fundraising,” Martina explains.
Working alongside the HSE, who are providing most of the running costs of the Hospice when it’s open, the charity will still continue to fund day care services and some other essential services.
“We’re trying to do this without a bank loan, we don’t want to draw down a bank loan to finish our hospice, we’d continue to plead with the public, they have been fantastic in supporting us so far and to keep that going.”
The CEO said the charity is appealing to elected representatives in the run-up to Christmas and before they start ‘dishing out the money’.
“We would ask them to be pro-active with the hospice and let us know where we could get grant funding for capital builds.”
Asked how the charity has found communication with elected representatives, Martina says, ‘probably not hugely positive’.
She adds: “We haven’t had a lot of feedback, we have approached some of our elected representatives but they haven’t came back, in fact we were told at one stage that we wouldn’t qualify under dormant account funding which we found quite strange, given that another hospice had received funding from it.”
Ms Jennings explained that on making further contact for a meeting and asking for assistance regarding where they could seek a source of capital funding, the charity has heard nothing back, to date.
 “The ones who are elected in the area at the minute that can look by and see a voluntary organisation putting €15 million of funds to build these two facilities, that they’ve put as part of their palliative care plan for the next five years, it’s not good enough. It’s not good enough for them to turn around to us and say, ‘there’s grants out there, maybe you should apply for them’ or ‘ye don’t actually qualify for them’. We shouldn’t even have to look for them,” maintains Ms Jennings.

Bank loan
Although the charity have a bank loan secured, the CEO highlights that politicians should be doing what they can in order to serve their constituents, some of which currently use the service.
“Thankfully we have a bank loan secured and if we have to draw it down we will, this is not going to stop us from building the hospice. We committed that we would build this hospice and that’s exactly what we will do. However, our elected representatives are representing the public where we are fundraising from, so, it might be no harm if they could dip into the Christmas Santa sock and pull out some capital funding for Mayo Roscommon Hospice.”
To put the charity’s work into context, Martina explained that 47 percent of its patients are non-cancer.
“One in 20 of us will receive a cancer diagnosis worldwide by 2020, so everybody will need hospice services at some stage of their lives. This new hospice building isn’t a ‘nice to have’ - it’s an absolute ‘need to have’.
She explained that in the last 12 months 200 people died in a public hospital setting without ‘dignity’, ‘privacy’ and ‘comfort’. “It’s not good enough in this day and age.”

MORE The 14th annual Club Stars banquet in Knockranny House Hotel, Westport, takes place on Saturday, January 12 next. The awards are being run in conjunction with The Mayo News, O’Neills Sports and AIB while the proceeds from this season’s Club Stars banquet will be donated to the Mayo Roscommon Hospice. Tickets are available on Eventbrite now and are priced at €65.