Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I agree with my colleague and we have discussed this before. We need not only to do an examination but to try to get to the root of this. We need to establish what is necessary when it comes to oversight, good governance, tracking and so on. We can go from one case to another lamenting their various failures but having already done a lot of high-profile, sometimes controversial, work, our job at this stage is to assist in the process of finding as adequate a solution as we can.

I want to raise the issue of nursing homes, something I have raised here before. In fits and starts there have been question marks and controversies around various provisions and the fair deal scheme and so on. We recently had a controversy over people being charged extras, sometimes in quite dubious situations, or so it would seem from the coverage. This is an area we need to examine. It is a matter of public concern, not just because of the considerable sums of public money that are invested in these kinds of services, and rightly so, but also because we could be looking at a near parallel to the pay top-up business operating within the sector. I suggest that we strongly consider addressing these issues in the autumn.