Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I cannot get my head around the contract and the tender for the service where people arrive for 15 minutes of professional care. With most tenders and contracts, the provider inflates the tender such that it is often bigger than what is required in order that they can gain profit and so on. However, the system we currently have seems to be such that they have almost cut the costs out of this so much as a collective industry - I am not suggesting they act as a cartel - that there are not the basic finances within the overall envelope to meet the demand. Effectively, we have professional carers operating on zero-hour contracts, despite that being prohibited under law. Furthermore, there is a common law obligation that any costs incurred in the course of carrying out one's employment are met by one's employer. If one travels from house A to house B to house C, it is obvious that the costs are being incurred by the carers and that they are incurring them in the normal course of their employment. Again, I cannot understand why the contract does not prohibit that or why nobody has taken a claim stating that he or she should be paid for travel costs between houses. There is a more structural issue there in that the tender process is a savaging exercise among the whole industry, whereas the industry should use it to bring in more resources - and it should not be an industry, but that is a separate point.

I hear rumours that the overall number of contracts is being reduced and that some of the community-based tenderers may be squeezed out by the HSE wanting to deal with maybe four or five large providers. Could the witnesses comment on that? There were a lot of questions there.