John Deasy (Waterford, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

That is fair enough and the Secretary General explained that this is a new landscape and when the Department got involved in this first it was something nobody had dealt with before. Such things will happen and that is fair enough. The Department can acknowledge that but when it was pointed out that estates were left off that list, the Department did not step in and say, "Fair enough". The Department allowed it to go to the Ombudsman. It is almost as if the Department has been forced to act on this by the Ombudsman and the litany of complaints. Two or three weeks from now we will have another statutory instrument to clear this up. We need to act a bit quicker when we acknowledge - as we are doing - that this is a new landscape regarding putting this together. The list was incomplete, the complaints came in, they were verified, the Department acknowledged this, but it did nothing. We have had to go to the Ombudsman and we are almost forced into dealing with it. Sometimes a quick decision in the Department to deal with matters might be better.