Dr. James Casey:

The Acting Chairman is right. The service providers and charities do a good job. They provide valuable services and they provide services for certain people. There are certain ones, especially smaller local charities, that do fantastic work because they know what is going on. That changes when things are scaled up and they become corporate and have a corporate office. There are solutions and we do not need to reinvent the wheel. Let us look at the Nordic countries and a country of a similar size and output. Unfortunately, we always look towards Britain, the US, Australia and New Zealand. That is great because we have a great history and culture with those countries, but socially we are very different and our values are very different. If we look at somewhere like Finland, Sweden or Denmark, which have the same GDP population-wise, how are they getting things right? Why can we not just copy them, and in our own Irish way because they are very serious people and we are not so much? We can do that. Those countries have personal budgets for disabled people and people can bring their voucher wherever the need to, and that is managed by the local authority. We do not need to reinvent the wheel and we need not to start from a false positive of looking at research and countries that are outside our realm of social values. We have the same social values as the Nordic countries but maybe not the same language. Unfortunately, the United States, Britain and the others are not in the Union, which is a fundamental thing for us because we have signed up to the Union's collective of values. We should look at what the Nordic countries have done right and done wrong and how we can we adopt that.