Mr. Niall Redmond:

I thank the Deputy for his questions. On equity, as I have mentioned, it is important to take into account the purpose and the policy objectives of the fair deal scheme, including in the context of the heads of Bill that we have developed, and the situation prior to the introduction of the scheme. I have read some of the Oireachtas debates on the introduction of the Act in 2008. One of the main aims of the fair deal scheme was to correct the situation whereby people of similar means were paying different levels of contribution.

Part of what the fair deal scheme attempts to do is to provide a situation where a person pays a contribution towards his or her care based on the means he or she has. Effectively, that boils down the more means a person has, the more one pays, and the less means one has, the less one pays. What is being suggested would fundamentally move away from that, irrespective of the other policies that may exist and those other policies that exist in relation to other aspects of Government. They have a particular policy intent and a particular policy objective. I am not necessarily convinced that this undermines any of those. I think this is a different policy intent. The fundamentals of the nursing homes support scheme being based on financial assessment of means would be significantly undone if we were to do anything else in relation to that and would actually create a situation where we are back to a position again that we were in previously where one resident in a nursing home has more means than another but contributes less to the scheme. That is the situation that the scheme tried to fix. We have done well in terms of doing that and supporting 100,000 people in the past ten years. Any move backwards in relation to that would create significant difficulties with the scheme.