Ms Emily O'Reilly:

I would welcome the interventions suggested. The reason I outlined the other issues pertaining to nursing homes and the huge bill eventually imposed on all of us as a result of - to put it colloquially - the ducking and diving by the Department for many decades is I wanted to draw attention not only to individual issues but also to the fact that there appeared to be a particular culture in the Department. I have often asked my colleagues in the office what it is about the Department which enables this pattern of behaviour to continue. The Minister is intent on pursuing reform strategies and we are delighted that the Ombudsman (Amendment) Act 2012 has passed and that work is continuing on the freedom of information legislation. However, the phrase "culture eats strategy for breakfast" comes to mind because the issue has transcended political parties and Governments and the same thing keeps happening. The Department has been alerted to an illegality and chosen to ignore it, hoping and crossing its fingers that nobody will find out or that it will not be rumbled. I tell my children that they should behave because eventually things will catch up with them and that is what has happened. It happened most spectacularly in 2004 and the administrative schemes we are discussing offer a similar demonstration of a particular culture, albeit on a smaller scale. I will not tell the committee how it should do its work, but to my mind an exploration of that culture has to be at the core because otherwise it will continue.

On the importance of obeying the rule of law, the country is in extremis in western terms, but it is still reasonably wealthy, even if we are struggling with our budgets. Perhaps the Department thinks what it is doing will be publicly palatable, but I do not accept this. Recently I gave a talk on the institutions of national ombudsmen throughout Europe in which I compared western models to the new models developed following the collapse of communism in eastern, southern and central Europe. I was struck by how quickly people wanted to cling onto offices or create new bodies such as ombudsman offices in order to embed the rule of law. I was also struck by how fragile they could be. I am not comparing what has happened here with what has happened in certain states where democracy is relatively undeveloped, but the same issue arises. We either obey the rule of law or we do not. We cannot cherry-pick the pieces that do not fit. The Department of Health has a section that is dedicated to dealing with disability issues, with a Minister of State assigned to it. It is not as if disability and these schemes are being dealt with by a clerical officer or a handful of people. It cannot be beyond the capacity of that dedicated section to devise a scheme which would be fair and do what it was supposed to do in terms of allowing mobility to those whose mobility is restricted by disability while also meeting the financial criteria.