Mr. John Dunne:

Let us be clear. It is not a diktat from an official and I do not suggest that there is badness anywhere. It is my assessment that there is a culture, in certain parts of the public service, where people do their job on their terms. Under the Croke Park agreement they continue to do their job on their terms but have now been moved to a new job. I do not know the individual that I am talking about but I presume that his or her previous job involved doing home help. That means that he or she stayed in the company of a person and did a bit of housekeeping, shopping or whatever. The work was not time critical and the carer was wanted in the middle of the day. The person has now been redeployed to a different sort of job which involves giving a certain degree of personal care and helping somebody into bed. There has been a vocal campaign on their behalf - and I am being general here - that these people deserve work and must be given work. In order to do that they are being redeployed. I have no issue, in principle, with that as long as he or she is properly trained and accepts that if he or she has a different job that it is done appropriately. The problem is that there been a culture of mismanagement within the system and there does not seem to be an ability to drive change. I do not suggest that there is badness anywhere. There are gaps in the system and there is a cultural and systemic problem.

Deputy Ó Caoláin raised the issue of cuts. Obviously there have been cutbacks. Deputy Regina Doherty also raised the matter in terms of a geographical spread. Two shifts have taken place and both are strategically sensible. First, there has been a shift from home care to home help. Where resources are scarce it makes sense to concentrate available resources on the people who have the greatest level of dependency but one must not write off others. That is why we asked for that piece to be backfilled.

Second, for some strange reason there has always been a better level of home help and home care support in the south and west than in Dublin and along the east coast. The HSE is trying to strategically re-align its spending in that area to match the demographic. It is hard to argue with that aspiration.

The net reduction of 2,500 in terms of recipients of home supports was mentioned. At this stage people are experiencing substantial cuts but they tend to be marginal rather than a total abolition of services. We must bear in mind that there is a constant turnover in home care and home help, particularly in home help, when people die or go into residential institutions. That results in significant savings in the short-term because the budget paid for home care is not reallocated but then there is a longer queue created because people must wait for new services.

Senator Burke asked for home care funding to be ring-fenced. I shall return to the management culture and state that I am more than slightly nervous at the concept of ring-fencing. We need change but ring-fencing would create an obstacle. I shall return to the statutory obligation and ask for equal priority to be given to the two pots of money. It would ensure that it is not a matter of having no home care or giving six times as much funding to put a person's granny where she does not want to be. That is literally where we are at and is purely down to legislation. The provision is not even politically controversial because the previous Government prioritised it and the current Government has it somewhere on its shopping list. The Government is wasting money every week that we are without that legislation.

I shall make a final point on the institutional side of the debate. Mr. Dillon is right that it is the Department of Health rather than the HSE that writes the strategies. It is the same group of officials who will write the legislation and that is where extra staff resources could be provided. Enacting the legislation is the single most important thing the committee could do for the sector.