Róisín Shortall (Dublin North West, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I agree with some of the points the Minister made. Nursing homes got a ton of money during Covid; there is no doubt about that. There was a lot of talk in the early days of Covid by the then Taoiseach, Deputy Varadkar, to the effect that we would have to take a new approach to the care of older people, that congregated settings were not the best model, that we needed to develop a new model of care and so on, but that all seems to have gone by the wayside. In any event, this is not about the owners of nursing homes; it is about the people who work in nursing homes and other groups and organisations in the general health and social care area. Many of those people are very poorly paid. These are the people everyone was thanking and so on. The Government announced last January that it was introducing a recognition payment scheme. It is very bad form that that issue has not been addressed for non-HSE or non-section 38 organisation staff. A large number of people in private sector organisations have not yet received their payment and our guests are telling us 300 of the organisations will have been paid by Christmas. That is very disappointing. A much greater effort should have been made to reach those people. I get queries all the time from these people on low pay, obviously with a very definite focus on Christmas and the increase in the cost of living. Is there any way of expediting the payments? It is unfair to treat people like this.

Moving on to the question of State claims, I raised this, in the context of the final Scally report, during Leaders' Questions with the Taoiseach about two weeks ago. I asked at the time in regard to an issue related to the Meenan review and the Taoiseach stated he would revert to me with details on that. He did not do so and I followed up, and the response I got from him just the other day suggested he had asked the Minister to provide the detail on that. The expert group under Mr. Justice Meenan was set up in the middle of 2018 and reported around this time two years ago, but there still has not been an implementation of those recommendations. We can ask all the questions we like and we can talk about policy regarding State claims, but why have we not introduced these reforms the expert group recommended and what is the reason for the delay? There are 17 recommendations, ten of which relate to the Department of Health. What timescale is the Department working to with a view to implementing all of them?