Deputy Mary Lou McDonald- speech from 1 Feb 2023

Taoiseach, yesterday you admitted to the Dáil that you were in fact briefed on government legal strategy on nursing home charges. This was 24 hours after you stated that you weren't involved in the strategy and sought to put distance between you and it. But not alone did you admit that you were briefed, that your predecessors and successors in government were also briefed, but you also stated that you stand Foursquare behind this plan, this strategy, and your expressed view is that this was and is a good government strategy. A heartless plan designed by government to hardball elderly, vulnerable people and their families, families forced to pay nursing home charges they shouldn't have been paying, a strategy to stop them getting their money back, to prevent them from vindicating their rights and to keep things quiet. Last night, we learned on Ortiz Prime Time that another cold and heartless government strategy was in place to remove allowances, the disability maintenance payment from people with disabilities in residential care. This was a government decision that was deemed to be unlawful. The documentation from 2009 shows that the government of the day knew that these citizens were entitled to their allowance, but use their vulnerability to prevent them from getting their payment. This, another political strategy put in place to stop ordinary people wronged by government from taking their case to court. And why was this? Well, the view of the Attorney General at the time was that the state would be unable to defend these cases successfully. And so, another strategy to conceal, to deny, to cover up, to protect the government, instead of protecting vulnerable citizens. In fact, this secret document set out that a comprehensive trawl of all of those who had been illegally stripped of their disability maintenance payment should not be done, because it said, and I quote, such an exercise would be unlikely to escape media attention or speculation and could generate further claims which otherwise would not have been made. And the Minister for Health of the day, indeed, the entire Cabinet, endorsed this strategy. And, of course, it was endorsed again by the 2011 Government, in which you were a part, because it was reflected in the memo that I discussed with you yesterday. Now, Taoiseach, the story of these strategies is a sordid tale of successive governments involving Fianna Fáil, Fianna Gael, the Labour Party, the late Progressive Democrats, actively working against the interests of some of our most vulnerable citizens. Families forced to use private nursing homes because of the failure of government to provide places within the public system. Families ripped off. Many forced to work into their 70s or two to just get by, in some cases, on less than 30 euro a week. And now we see a mirror image of this strategy, adopted by government after government, against citizens with disabilities dependent on the state to look after them, to vindicate their rights and to protect them. These were citizens, many of whom lived in sheltered environments and who may not have had the capacity to initiate their claim. And all of this has caused real hurt and real trauma for people, real hardship for many people. People who needed government to stand up for them, instead of governments facing them down and fighting them tooth and nail at every turn, to deny them things that they were entitled to. The human cost has been heavy and deep. So, Taoiseach, I ask you today, do you believe that this government strategy, set out in a memo from 2009, used against people with disabilities, was that a legitimate strategy for government? Is that a legitimate government strategy? Do you stand by that? Do you call this also a good plan and a good strategy from government? Thank you, Deputy Taoiseach. Thanks, Deputy. At the outset, I still can't fathom why you always feel the need to misrepresent what I say in this House and what the Government says. Obviously, I stand over what I said yesterday in relation to me being briefed, and I'm still trying to get the documents around that. What I can say is that a document that appeared in the papers yesterday in relation to 2016, we have confirmed from the Department of Health that I was not circulated on that document, and the agreement between the Minister and the AGO was not the Minister that made that agreement. It was a 2014 agreement. As you may know, when civil servants talk about Ministers, they often talk about the Minister in the context of the corporation's soul, not necessarily the person who was the Minister on the day, but look, that doesn't matter. That's just a sideshow. What does matter is the issues that you're raising now. In relation to the historic nursing home charges issue, I do want to emphasise once again that it doesn't relate to anyone in nursing homes today, or indeed in recent years. I think that's an important point of clarity that people in nursing homes today and their families will want to know. It relates to charges prior to the 2005-2006 period, and those matters were resolved prospectively when the nursing home support scheme, the Fair Deal, was introduced by Minister Harney back in 2009. That created a universal system that sets out how people are entitled to nursing home care and what contributions they need to make. The taxpayer has compensated those who are paid charges in public nursing homes to the tune of €480 million. That was the right thing to do, and, Deputy, it was done. In relation to private nursing homes, the situation is different. It is more complex, and that was explained at the time, back in 2006. We don't accept that medical card patients ever had an unqualified entitlement to free private nursing home care, and the advice from the successive attorney generals is clear on that, that that is not an accepted position. And even to this day, Deputy, medical card patients either choose or are forced to go privately, and we don't reimburse them for their costs. Where we do pay for medical card patients to go privately, there is a system in place of prior approval, and that is the position. It was never the intention of the government or the Oireachtas to confer a right to free private nursing home care on medical card patients, and that is clear from the debates in the Dáil, if you want to look back at them. And that does matter. What the Oireachtas intended, what government policy was, does matter. Yes, some cases have been settled with the financial settlement, others have been settled without a financial settlement, and some cases were not settled at all, because they have been managed on a case-by-case basis, pending a test case, which has never happened. There will be a report from the Attorney General on this in the Cabinet next week, and I know the Department of Health is keen to report on it as well. In relation to the other matter that you raised, which is the disabled person's maintenance allowance, this was paid between 1973 and 1996 under the Health Act of 1970 by the former health boards. I am advised that the allowance, which could be and was used for food, heating, electricity, rent, and so forth, was paid to people who could not provide for themselves. The policy position at the time, rightly or wrongly, this is going back to the 70s, 80s, and 90s, was that this money was no longer required as the individual was living in state-funded residential care, and those needs were being met. And so people with a disability who were resident in long-term care facilities did not receive this allowance after the first weeks in residential care. In 1996, the allowance was renamed the Disability Allowance, and responsibility for it was transferred to the Department of Social, Community and Family Affairs, as was called at the time. Since 2007, it has been paid in full to people with disabilities living in long-term care, so this matter was resolved 15 years ago. However, the question that arose in 2009 is whether there should have been back pay, whether there should have been retrospection. It is a historic issue, it is a legacy issue, but it does appear different to the nursing home charges issue to me. It appears different in substance, because the legal advice is different, and the legal advice and position became clear after the High Court, and it is something that we are going to look into over the next week or two and respond to further. Thank you, Taoiseach. Deputy McDonough. Deputy McDonough. Yesterday, you expressed incredulity at any suggestion here, and here is your word, so I am not accused of misrepresenting or misquoting you. The allegation is clear that four or five governments, four or five attorneys general, any number of ministers and former ministers, some of whom are still in government, some in opposition, and dozens of officials, all conspired to deny people refunds they were entitled to. That is as far-fetched as it sounds. It is not what happened. But you see, Taoiseach, it is exactly what happened. That is exactly what happened. It happened in respect of preventing those who had been illegally charged in nursing homes from going to the courts and having the matter adjudicated and getting their money back. And it also happened in respect of these citizens, who, by the way, were entitled to that allowance. It was illegal. It was judged to have been ultra-virus illegal for the state to deny those people that money. And again, the same strategy, keep it quiet, say nothing, don't raise the hair. And the worst aspect of Count Corlea, government after government, knowing that the state had wronged and denied people things that they were entitled to, colluded and conspired a strategy to ensure that people could not have their rights vindicated. Where is the compassion in that, Taoiseach? Where is the care for people? Where is a government actually standing up for people rather than facing them down, many of them in the most vulnerable circumstances imaginable in our society? Thank you very much, Deputy McDonnell. Thanks, Deputy. I think you're conflating two different issues, and they are different, the historic nursing home charges and the issue of the DPMA. And they are different, Deputy. And the legal advice is different. The legal advice in relation to DPMA was that the state didn't have a leg to stand on. The legal advice in relation to the nursing homes is that those charges were not illegal. And that's never been established, Deputy. And you're making an assertion that is not established and hasn't been established. And you've ultimately made an assertion that people are prevented from going to court. Nobody's prevented from going to court, Deputy. You can't prevent somebody from going to court in Ireland. That's an entirely false statement. There were cases that were settled, and there were cases that have not been settled, and they may yet go to court, Deputy. So that assertion is also false. But, Deputy, I've been a member of three governments now. And more so than ever, we've put a huge amount of time and care and resources into putting right some of the wrongs of the past. Whether it's magical and laundries, whether it's mother and baby institutions, whether it's Mike and Pyrite, whether it's the apartment block defects, we've put huge effort and care and resources into putting right some of the wrongs of the past. More so than other governments have done, or governments around the world have done. But the government does have a responsibility to do what is right and just, but also has a responsibility to protect the taxpayer and to protect the common good. And that means balancing the future and the past. That's something that has to be done. The Leader of the Labour Party.