Seán Crowe (Dublin South West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I am just trying to sum up. We were talking about three different groups of people. I mentioned the elderly, people with mental health issues and people with disabilities. There could be people who are in all three of those cohorts. There are basically three groups and one got paid. The people who never applied to the scheme because they were advised not to clearly were not paid. Then there are the people who applied but a deciding officer told them they were not entitled to the repayments under the scheme and did not appeal that decision. The last group, which is the minority, are the ones who did appeal and ultimately received what was due to them. People are listening at home and saying there is huge money involved in this and they are stressing about it. I do not know if anyone wants to comment on this. That €40,000 sounds like a huge amount but it is over a number of years. These are things people were paying towards for their loved ones, like getting their hair done and all those extra things. I know of a family in one nursing home that were paying rent every month for the bed and the mattress. That was included in the additional charges. There are appalling things happening. There are others that charge if someone comes in and puts on a bit of music or something like that. These are all the additional things people are charged for. While it might seem unfair to some that there are people getting huge money out of this, it is a repayment scheme that was established by the Oireachtas, by legislators, on the basis that we felt people were entitled to this money. We are not giving out payments to people who were not entitled to them, at the end of the day. Maybe that is me on my soapbox.

I appreciate the witnesses coming in. It was really useful. We shone a light on this to some extent. It is a confusing issue. I am happy to hear the witnesses will possibly come back in three months with that report and we will maybe get a greater sense of what happened. It is largely historical but it is about fairness and justice and, hopefully, the matter will come to a conclusion soon.