Colm Burke (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank all the witnesses for their presentations and for the work they are doing. I wish to raise the issue of enduring power of attorney, which I have raised previously. I do not think we have done enough in setting out its advantages. As a practising solicitor, I find I am being asked to complete enduring power of attorney forms when there is a question mark as to whether the person is competent to even sign it. It is a huge problem. The doctors have to sign off on it and there is hesitation, as people are coming to us too late. We need to do a big sales effort on the issue to communicate the advantages of allocating enduring power of attorney when people are in full health and not when their health is failing.

On the way our health services deal with issues, I know of an example in which the management of a patient went wrong, doctors accepted that it had gone wrong, an internal inquiry was set up and everyone was happy with that, and then the internal reviewers decided that there should be an external reviewer to keep everyone happy and make sure it was independent and everything else. Seven months later, someone in administration has decided they are not happy with the external reviewer who was appointed. The family has been looking for answers for seven or eight months and the inquiry is not even happening. That is the kind of thing that is so frustrating. Now everyone is convinced that people within the hospital are trying to hide something, which is not the case. The people within the hospital want answers just as everyone else does. Nevertheless, that impression has been created because of the delays in dealing with the issue. These matters need to be prioritised. If there is a review to be done, it should be done as quickly and efficiently as possible.

In respect of local authorities in particular, I wish to raise the failure to ensure that there is one person in charge of a file. I have two complaints on this issue, one with the Ombudsman and one with the Ombudsman for Children. For children with disabilities, I know of cases in which work needed to be done on local authority houses, yet seven or eight years later no work has been done. It causes great frustration that there is no one person taking charge of the issue within the local authority. I would say that the offices of the Ombudsman and the Ombudsman for Children are having the same problem. I do not understand why people cannot take responsibility. I recently spent an hour on the phone on one problem, going from one department to another - four departments altogether - only to be referred back to the first one. No one person in any of them was responsible for the file, yet the issue has been ongoing for seven years. Surely we can do something about that. If we had a proper procedure within the authorities, we would not have half the complaints we do. Mr. Tyndall might outline his own frustration with that issue. I am sure he is having the same problem pinning down who is in charge. We need a radical change. At European level - in the health section of the European Commission, for example - there are perhaps 80 different departments, but there is a named responsible person under each of them. In local authorities and a whole lot of State agencies here, we cannot get that. We could remove an awful lot of the delays and provide information and answers.