Third Age is an NGO that was established 26 years ago in the village of Summerhill in Co. Meath, originally as an active retirement agency for local people. Over the years, however, Third Age has changed and grown dramatically such that it is now a national organisation with a number of national and international programmes.
“We still have an important local and regional remit as well: Basically, our mission and vision is to promote the value of the contribution of older people throughout Ireland,” said Head of Communications at Third Age, Anne Dempsey.
“We walk the walk on that one in that we have over 1,000 older volunteers all working in a number of community programmes,” said Ms Dempsey.
Third Age’s longest-established programme is called the “Senior helpline”. The helpline is a confidential telephone service for older people, and the service is provided by trained older volunteers. According to Ms Dempsey, Third Age provide Ireland’s only such peer service for older people, and it is one of very few such services in the world.
“We had about 30,000 calls from older people around Ireland last year. An awful lot of them are lonely, isolated, or in crisis, or worried or down or depressed. In recent years that has been a lot of stuff around the whole economic situation. In recent times things like the property tax—and now the water charges and household social charges—all these things are impacting quite heavily on our callers,” said Ms Dempsey.
It’s good to talk
Ms Dempsey says that older people frequently have no one to talk to about their worries, be they financial or otherwise. “Our volunteers are trained in a very particular way to listen empathetically to the caller to try and help them say whatever they need to say about a situation—it might be a family situation, for example…to try to open out and unpack the whole thing. Then we begin to look with the caller at what they can do to help their own situation. We don’t tell people what to do: we kind of empower them by helping them find some of their own solutions,” she said.
“On the helpline loneliness is the prevailing issue…it would reveal, I think, the secret desperate loneliness in which many older people in Ireland live,” said Ms Dempsey. This could be due to families emigrating, or a split in the communities due to families moving for accommodation, or due to the closing down of local post offices, and local pubs.
“The whole easy way of life has changed over the years: people are more in their homes, there is less dropping in, and life is much more regimented. Younger people are busier and are working longer hours, travelling longer commutes to work. Without anybody being at fault, this does tend to create the gap, the separation and segregation between the generations, I think,” said Ms Dempsey.
Support
Third Age are involving older people in a variety of projects, and one such project is Fáilte Isteach. This is a community project with older volunteers for welcoming new migrants through conversational English classes. The project began in Summerhill about eight years ago, explains Ms Dempsey.
“We noticed in one little village a young mum from Argentina shopping with her son on a school day—she was shopping with him because he had more English. He was telling her what to buy. Within the next few weeks, we began offering free classes in conversational English for people all around the village…people began coming, migrants and their wives, their families. We are opening our 67th centre in Ireland this month. It is a very wonderful project which impacts thousands of migrant families every week in Ireland—it has helped them become integrated and it has helped them become more marketable, it has helped their families,” said Ms Dempsey, who noted that Third Age receives funding from the Office for the Promotion of Migrant Integration for that project.
Wisdom comes with age
Sage is another of Third Age’s innovative projects where older volunteers are making a positive impact. “The aim is to expand older peoples’ access to support and advocacy services in all care settings and wherever ageing poses a challenge for individuals,” said Ms Dempsey. The service was initiated by the HSE in response to the Leas Cross Nursing Home enquiry in 2005 and is now being developed under the governance of Third Age Ireland, with funding from the HSE and Atlantic Philanthropies.
Third Age took over the HSE project about three years ago, explained Ms Dempsey. “Again it is a project in a very expansive phase: there is an understanding that advocacy for older people is very much the coming thing, and not just in nursing homes but also in the community. As the ageing demographic changes, people may want someone to represent and speak for them.”
Engaging the Elderly
Third Age as an organisation is unusual in that they work both with engaged older people and with the more vulnerable and needy section of older people. One of the main issues that they see is that there is a lack of understanding about what older people can contribute. “A lot of older people want to just get on with their lives, pay their golf or see their pals, but there are others around retirement or post retirement age who kind of feel that they lack a bit of purpose or meaning. They have had such value in their lives for so long and they want to continue to contribute or give something back, or use their experience, or do mentoring,” said Ms Dempsey.
