Mr. Ger Deering:

It is very difficult to say what is holding it back but it has to be in some ways a lack of joined-up thinking and a lack of willingness to actually put a new scheme in place. To briefly give the history, my predecessors carried out a number of investigations and found inadequacies in the schemes that were in place. Unfortunately, the response to that was to discontinue the schemes, which was completely unacceptable because they were not replaced.

It is accepted that the schemes had problems but at least they were there. They were of some benefit to the people who used them. Most recently, there was a High Court challenge to the current scheme. It was found that the criteria that were put in place for the scheme were not in line with the governing legislation. I think everybody had agreed that the criteria in any case were way too restrictive. However, the solution the Government came up with at the time was to put those restrictive criteria into the primary legislation. With those very strict criteria, some people can access the scheme but it is very restricted. There are other people who are equally as immobile but who do not meet those restrictive criteria, perhaps having no limbs, or whatever that criterion is. We believe that at each step of this process, the solution of actually either withdrawing a scheme, or making it more restrictive, is really wrong. We have been told that there are moves afoot, and I welcome the fact that the Minister of State at the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, Deputy Anne Rabbitte, is chairing a cross-departmental committee looking at this. We just got an update today which says the committee will be publishing a report and we would like to see that.