Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I also express my thoughts and sympathies to the people of Türkiye and Syria, who have been so badly impacted by Monday's devastating earthquakes. The huge loss of life and utter destruction are truly horrific and heartbreaking. We all share that sentiment.

I raise the issue of the Attorney General's report into the nursing home and disability payments scandal. It is not surprising that the Attorney General has provided such a staunch defence of the legal strategy that was devised and endorsed by his own office and successive Governments over many years. What does come as a surprise, however, is how incredibly blinkered the report is. Throughout it, cost containment is repeatedly conflated with the public interest. In summary, keeping costs down is good and screwing over vulnerable citizens is legally sound. Even in the case of the State effectively illegally stealing disability payments from the most vulnerable citizens, the Attorney General tells us there is "no positive legal obligation" to repay those funds.

As the Taoiseach himself said last week, this is a case that does "not have a [legal] leg to stand on". I have been thinking about that line, "no positive legal obligation", since I read it in the report. I must say that I find that really extraordinary. This is a bald admission that the State had no valid legal authority to withdraw the meagre disability payments from extremely vulnerable citizens who were in residential care and no strict legal duty to repay that money, so, effectively, it did not bother. I wonder how that defence would have gone down if the banks had tried to use it, for example, in the tracker mortgages that we have just heard about. I refer to large institutions, with much deeper pockets than the impoverished consumers it ripped off, effectively saying that if those customers thought they were badly treated they should come and sue them individually. Would the Taoiseach have been happy to see the banks adopt that scorched earth approach rather than, and it must be said belatedly so, identifying the customers who were impacted and paying redress as well as the large fines imposed by the regulator? In this case, we have a State behaving with less of a moral compass than the banks, which I find is really saying something.

What the Attorney General fails to grasp is that only a small minority of people has the capacity even to contemplate suing the State. The State would not lose its house at the end of the legal proceedings but those suing might. Irish people do not expect or want the State to force the most vulnerable citizens to litigate to enforce their legal rights and entitlements. We expect the State to defend and vindicate these rights. At the very least, we expect the State to own up to its wrongs and to undo those wrongs. The legal strategy here is not something that is complicated or knowledgeable in terms of the legal formulation.

It was a very simple approach to keep our heads down and hope we get away with it, having ripped off all those vulnerable people. Is the Taoiseach still happy to stand over that strategy having read the defence in the Attorney General's report?

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