Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

There has been no response. It normally takes a couple of weeks. If we meet here on Thursday, it is probably after the weekend by the time the letter goes out. There is a lot of work to be done so they probably have only received it. We give them a short period of time but we have a checklist to make sure we get them all back.

We are now back to dealing with items of correspondence in connection with Nursing Homes Ireland and HIQA. I will refer to the various items of correspondence first. We will then discuss them because they are all on the same issue. I want to put them all together for discussion. Items Nos. 822A(i) to (iv) are the opening statement and supporting documentation from HIQA for today's meeting. We received an opening statement yesterday and a revised opening statement this morning.

The next item of correspondence related to this is correspondence dated 18 October from Tadhg Daly, CEO of Nursing Homes Ireland, declining an invitation to appear at the committee. I will read that letter into the record. It is a short letter. We wrote to Nursing Homes Ireland after the last meeting after we had considered the correspondence that had been sent to us anonymously. We discussed it at the last meeting. The committee received that documentation and it was circulated. We wrote to Nursing Homes Ireland and the reply that came in yesterday said:

I acknowledge receipt of your request to NHI to attend, as a voluntary witness, a hearing before the PAC next Thursday (19th October) in regards certain matters that have been the subject of recent media coverage.

The Board of Directors has instructed me to reply as follows.

I am not in a position to attend such a meeting at this time. It is also important that I emphasise that all information connected with the matters to which you have referred, and aspects of which have been the subject of certain recent media reports, remains strictly confidential and covered by legal privilege.

It is a matter of the most serious concern to NHI, its officers and its memberships that purported extracts of a clearly recognised confidential and legally privileged memorandum have appeared in the public domain. NHI has not waived privilege over the content of its documentation and continues to rely on the strictly confidential nature of the information to which you have referred. Equally this privilege also applies to the setting within which the discussions you refer to took place, as this involved a consultation with legal advisors. The priority for NHI remains to ensure that there are no further breaches of NHI's legal rights, or of the legal rights of its officers, ex-officers and members.

A further issue which prevents me from accepting your invitation to attend is that you have not provided me with the nature of the questions which the members of PAC might wish to canvass and as you will appreciate this substantially curtails my ability to prepare appropriately for any such meeting. Should you wish me or any other officer of NHI to re-consider such a request in the future I would respectfully ask that you would provide an agreed agenda, including a schedule of agreed questions which the members of PAC intend raising, and that you would do so within a reasonable time frame in advance of such a meeting.

Kind regards,

Tadhg Daly

As a result of that, it is clear the document we received the last day was a document prepared for Nursing Homes Ireland which it says is legally privileged. It is saying it is not waiving its legal privilege. The issue is that the Oireachtas has a job to protect the rights of citizens and citizens have rights to legal privilege. It is not the function of the Committee of Public Accounts to ignore that we have been specifically informed in legal writing that these documents have legal privilege regardless of how they came into our possession. They were published in the Sunday Independentwhich is the reason we discussed the matter. It is the function of the Oireachtas to protect our citizens and their legal rights. I am just making that statement before we decide what to do.