Meet your MP.

Actually Patricia Donald is an MPP - Member of the Pensioners’ Parliament.

You won’t have seen her face on an election poster on the lamppost down the road nor her name on a ballot paper. You won’t have voted for her, but she is still your MPP, even if you don’t keep your teeth in a glass of water beside your bed at night.

You may be in the first flush of youth or even too young to exercise your franchise. However, if you are lucky and the government doesn’t move the goal posts completely beyond the playing field of life you will one day reach pension age. When you get there you will be glad to have had Patricia and her fellow MPPs fighting your corner.

She’s a former nurse who just can’t stop caring and while she has hung up her uniform and said goodbye to her patients she still wants to help. She could have gone into mainstream politics but in Northern Ireland that means mainstream sectarianism.

“I would enjoy politics in Northern Ireland if it wasn’t so religiously divided,” says Patricia. “That’s why I enjoy the Pensioners’ Parliament, because it’s not sectarian. A poor pensioner is a poor pensioner, regardless of whether they’re catholic or protestant.” What she brings to the Pensioners’ Parliament is a lifetime of experience in health care, both as a front line nurse and latterly in administration.

Born in Dublin, she was brought up in Cork and, aged 11, came to live with her uncle and aunt, Eddie and Ada McMullen, on the Dublin Road in Enniskillen. She trained as a nurse in the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast and worked at Purdysburn Fever Hospital on the outskirts of the city, looking after patients, many of them children, with diseases such as polio, tuberculosis, measles and meningitis.

“We must have been healthy because none of us caught any,” she smiles. “We were good. Very good.” Of course today they would be immunised.

“Vaccines have made the greatest difference to child health probably than any other factor,” Patricia argues.

She worked in Fermanagh as a health visitor from 1964 until 1969 when she moved to England to take up a senior post in nursing management. On her return to Northern Ireland she joined the Department of Health and became a community nursing advisor to the government. In 1981 she joined the Western Health and Social Services Board as one of only four chief nurses in Northern Ireland, retiring in 1994.

“I retired and I still wanted to use my skills,” she recalls. “It was a medical colleague who said: ‘You will come to Age Concern with us because we could use your expertise.’ “It was a pity to waste my experience and I wanted to keep an interest in services for old people and hospital patients,” she explains.

Age Concern was a charity involved in helping the elderly.

“During that time I was involved in the design and development of the Alzheimer’s unit at Omagh, built by Age Concern. It’s a very good unit; it’s a model of practice,” says Patricia.

In 2009 Age Concern amalgamated with Help the Aged to form Age NI to deliver care services, provide advice and advocacy, raise funds and influence decision-makers to improve later life for everyone.

“Then I became involved with the South West Age Partnership. It covers the voluntary groups for older people in Tyrone and Fermanagh. We work with the old people’s clubs. The problem with them is that the people running them are in their 70s and the people going to them are in their 90s,” Patricia explains.

There are about 80 senior citizens’ clubs in Fermanagh and Tyrone, meeting in church halls and community centres to provide social, physical and mental activities for pensioners.

“One of the problems is that the Health Trust will not give core funding to the groups and it can be very difficult to keep them going,” she admits.

She says the groups are “vital to the mental wellbeing of our older people” in terms of preventing depression, loneliness and social isolation, yet the Western Health Trust will not fund them.

“It’s not a lot of money,” Patricia insists. “£1,000 would do a lot. For value for money there’s nothing to touch them.

Patricia is also involved with the Age Sector Platform, which lobbies politicians on issues effecting the elderly and is responsible for the Pensioners’ Parliaments.

“There’s one in every county,” she says.

Between 100 and 150 people attend the Fermanagh Pensioners’ Parliament, discussing issues of concern to the elderly.

“Health and social care has moved up the agenda, particularly in view of the Compton Report, which is very idealistic about looking after people in their own homes, which is what most people would want.

But to date the resources have not been put in and there are many gaps and we hear some very sad statistics about older people getting just 15 minutes care, three times a day, and this needs to be addressed.” She says the issue is primarily one of funding and the money will have to come from the acute services budget.

She acknowledges that it is “very difficult” decision for the Health Trust Staff.

“Everybody is looking for funding from the same pot of money but I don’t see why the elderly shouldn’t have their fair share of it. We are looking for a fair share; we are not looking for it all,” she stresses.

This is bread and butter politics as underlined by the Heat or Eat campaign, aimed at securing a better pension so that the elderly would not be faced with the dilemma: Do we buy food and shiver, or heat our homes and go hungry?

These are the issues debated at the Pensioners’ Parliament and taken to the corridors of power in London.

“We go over once a year to Westminster and meet the MPs and the Lords. They are all very good and listen to us,” says Patricia.

Westminster is where most of the important decisions are made but closer to home, the Northern Ireland Assembly has given pensioner’s free bus passes and prescriptions.

An enthusiastic traveller, Patricia says: “The bus pass is the greatest thing that has happened for older people. It truly is brilliant.” Even as it lobbies for more money to address issues effecting the elderly the Pensioners’ Parliament is itself running out of time and cash.

“It’s only funded for another couple of years and we don’t know what will happen when the funding runs out but we will be appealing to our new Fermanagh and Tyrone Council and the MLAs and MPs to fund it,” says Patricia.

With an ageing population that is growing in number throughout the western world the politicians would ignore the pensioners at their peril.

Patricia hopes that the new super council will “see older people as a very high priority, and after all they do vote and they do understand and councillors need to be talking to the older people and addressing the issues, particularly in Fermanagh and Tyrone”.

As for Patricia herself, she remains young at heart, interacting on social media through Twitter and Facebook, gardening, holidays, her cousins and their children and informal entertaining.

She remains motivated by her career in the health service and the feeling she still has a lot to offer.

“I didn’t want to go to my bed and suffer from depression,” she adds.

“I’m a methodist and Methodists have always had a strong social gospel, which means they don’t just preach the Faith, they practice it,” says Patricia.