David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I wish to deal with the issue of people in private nursing homes. I am reading from the 2011 memo. We asked the Department to submit to the committee the memos that were given to Ministers in 2011 and 2016 as well as the notes from 2017. The Secretary General stated that releasing those documents was a matter for the Government, which it is. Can we write to the Minister and ask that they be furnished to us? As the Secretary General knows, we have the documents anyway, or at least extracts from them that were published in a national newspaper, but it would be better if we had the documents from the Department so that we could be sure we have the right ones.

Regarding those in private nursing homes, my understanding is that the memo submitted to the Government in 2011 was actually submitted to the Minister in Mr. Watt's then Department, namely, the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform. According to it, the legal advice was that an entitlement was subject to resource availability and that the claim for damages was not the appropriate legal remedy. It went on to say that, given the scale of the potential exposure, a multifaceted legal strategy had been developed by the previous Minister and Attorneys General and had been "developed and refined over time at a series of meetings at both official and ministerial level". It also stated that one of the defences was that the legal cases were based on the contention that any person with a medical card was entitled to call upon the State to provide a public nursing home bed and if that was not available, he or she was entitled to enter any nursing home of his or her choice, regardless of cost, and charge it to the State. According to the memo, the State had a number of defences to this litigation.

The memo refers to the claim that people were entitled to enter any nursing home of their choice, but does Mr. Watt accept that it was not a choice for many families? Medical card holders were in private nursing homes. Is it not the case that they were facilitated by the health boards in entering those, given that there was no public capacity?