'Care'? We don't give a flying f**k.

Do you remember Winterbourne View? To refresh your memory, staff at a residential establishment routinely abused people with learning disabilities.
Do you remember the story about elderly people being abused at Whipps Cross Hospital? Or Hillcroft in Lancashire?
You've heard about the abuse of children and young people in residential establishments in Ireland North and South?

Do you ever wonder why it goes on for years and years with noone intervening to make it stop? Well, perhaps this story will go some way to explaining. In case you are thinking that this kind of thing doesn't happen, that this individual was perhaps only covering up their own wrong doings, allow me to refer you to a few tiny reminders of the long and illustrious history of whistle blowers in the UK.

If there is any chance that you will be sacked and sanctioned for exposing abuse, maybe you would keep your mouth shut and your eyes closed.

When the doors are closed, all the people who live behind them are at the mercy of the people who work there and not all of those workers are good people. Some of those workers have no wish to be working in the field of care or support. They're sent on 'work programme' schemes and forced to apply for such jobs or lose their entitlement to benefits.

Let me tell you this for nothing... if you do not have the yen to work with / care for people, you should not be allowed through the doors never mind be sent there as a way of getting you off the dole queue.

It is hard work, it is challenging, it is sometimes thankless and it is sometimes desperately sad. It can be physically, emotionally, mentally and intellectually draining. It takes someone with enough chat for two mouths, the hide of a rhino, the strength and balance of a hod carrier, the sense of humour of FB God, the resilience of granite, the integrity of .... (mmm, can't decide who has integrity), the knowledge of a professor and the compassion of a saint.

If you're a good care worker in any field, you don't always have these things all the time but most of the time you have some of them and the rest of the time you rely on your colleagues and a healthy supply of genuine contrition and humility to get you through. By care work, I include cleaners, cooks, care assistants, caretakers and 'handymen' - all of those jobs that are usually filled by people who do it in spite of and not because of the financial rewards and recognition. Good care workers are people who will turn up every day and will love every minute of their day (more or less).

That's because care work is also great craic, satisfying, rewarding and a great learning experience.

But the thing is, care workers are some of the lowest paid workers in the UK and Ireland - probably elsewhere too. The pay and conditions deteriorated when governments decided to 'contract out' care services to the private sector. The private sector is thought to be cheaper and therefore more efficient - because when we are looking for someone to care for the most vulnerable voiceless people in society, the first thing we look for is 'cheap' and 'efficient'.

But generally the private sector is cheaper because it pays less. One of the biggest outgoings for a care service is staffing. The cost of electricity, food, insurance etc is pretty much the same for private or public but the staffing gives room for manoeuvre. Staffing costs can be reduced in a few ways - hourly rates can drop, enhanced rates for weekends, evenings and bank holidays can be cut, staffing levels can be reduced, hours can be decreased and increased to between zero and madness.

If we want people - ie our friends, parents, siblings, kids- to be safe, to have dignity, to be treated with compassion, to be looked after and to be happy when they come to be reliant on the kindness of strangers, we have to make sure that the strangers are people who want to and are able to give it. The strangers should be rewarded for it and they should be valued. Care work should not be the job that people do when there is nothing else in the job centre.

I think it is high time we had a good look at how we value those people who look after the people we love. We must start to acknowledge that, very often, we treat them like shite. If you don't want to be outraged on behalf of someone you love, be outraged on your own behalf - it could be your dinner getting cut up by a stranger sooner than you think.