A call was made for an investigation into each of 12 nursing homes, including one which Louth Fine Gael TD Fergus O'Dowd described as worse than Leas Cross.
Calling the nursing home system "rotten from top to bottom", Mr O'Dowd read out an inspection report from 2004 into Bedford House in Balbriggan, Co Dublin, which, he said, was in a "most shameful and disgraceful condition", where patients were bathed or showered only every 10 days, and where rooms were "caked with faeces".
He also read out complaints about other homes, including one run by a Montessori teacher who had no medical training. "They put all the records of patients in a skip and burned them so that when the coroner's inquests were being held there were no records to be found."
He added that last week he got a complaint from an undertaker that he took a body from a nursing home "that was in an appalling way physically. He had never seen anything like it. The body was covered in faeces, including the fingernails."
Mr O'Dowd, who has long campaigned against the abuse of the elderly in nursing homes, gave a harrowing account of the state of Bedford House. It and Leas Cross in north Dublin were the two main nursing homes that patients from St Ita's in Portrane were moved to after the institution was closed.
He said the home was run by a Dr Nasser. A routine inspection in 2004 found that "the physical condition of the nursing home was very run down".
In one bedroom shared by four men, there were commodes instead of toilets. Emergency call bells were not working. "Patients get a bath or shower every 10 days. In the sluice room downstairs the toilet is used by patients but there is no wash-hand basin."
One woman whose father was in Bedford nursing home complained that he had to take four stair lifts to his bedroom which was at the top of the house, so he could not go to bed when he wanted to. He was obliged to wait for the night staff after 8pm to go to bed.
The woman said that her father had received the best of treatment from staff, but that lately staff numbers had been cut and patients were being hurried, with not enough attention paid to them. There had been no television for 10 days and the response was always "it's being fixed tomorrow".
The nurse in charge of that nursing home was running another home at the same time, something forbidden by law. He added that the health board knew about this.
Another complaint about the same home showed that "the bathrooms are smelly, excrement is dug into the floors. Residents are not showered or bathed. There is a lack of supervision. Some residents are not dressed in the morning and hence left in their bedclothes all day."
He said he had received a complaint from a woman last week about one home where the staff are off at weekends and where young people come in and work "and leave the elderly patients in their own bodily fluids and faeces all night and when this lady goes in after the weekend that their bodies are literally caked. That's what's going on and you can't get away from it."
He said that the Government had done nothing about it and stood "charged before the court of public opinion".
The Government had failed in "the most important thing of all in protecting the vulnerable".
Earlier Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny quoted a nurse who dealt with a woman with mental illness. The woman, a nursing home resident, had "discharging sores on her legs", the nurse had stated. "If I did not dress her legs every day in our centre she would come in every morning bare-legged, winter or summer, wearing slippers and the discharge running down her legs. After repeated calls to the nursing home, this lady came in one morning with nappy liners placed on open sores."
Mr Kenny quoted a report from July this year that "inspection teams can express serious concerns about a particular nursing home, while simultaneously another arm of the HSE continues to place public patients in the same home".
Taoiseach Bertie Ahern said that the Government's priority was to prevent what happened in Leas Cross from recurring.
The Health Bill 2006, to be published in this Dáil session, "will create a robust system of inspections. It will provide for the first time for a statutory office, the office of the chief inspector of social services with the Health Information and Quality Authority organisation, with specific responsibility for the registration and inspection of all nursing home places, public and private, because they must all be examined."
