Mr. John McKeon:

We will consider it. I may be wrong, and if I am wrong, I am wrong, but I suspect that when we go back to our legal advisers in the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel they will tell us that the regulation does incorporate what the Cathaoirleach said. I may be wrong. As the committee knows, parliamentary counsel are always loath to flesh out law that does not need to be fleshed out. They like to keep it tight. I may be wrong and if I am wrong, so be it. We will take those comments on board and we will look at that. There is no issue there.

With regard to the issues Senator Wall raised about people with disabilities and so on, I would say one thing. I often say this and have said it at the Committee of Public Accounts, for example. The Department deals with close to 4 million claims of different types every year. Illness and disability cases are probably in the hundreds of thousands. Mr. Molloy can talk about that better than I can. We have to remember that the cases that come before representatives or ombudsmen are a very small minority of the overall number. It is wrong to characterise the overall system based on the exceptions.

On the format of claim forms and so on and the information that has to be provided, I will ask Mr. Molloy to talk to this. We work quite hard with advocacy groups and different representative groups to continuously revise and change claims forms and forms for submitting appeals and so on. There is always a balance to be struck because, on the one hand, people want them simple and, on the other, they want to be signposted through all the different questions. If you signpost all the different questions, you end up with a very long form but if you keep it simple, you end up with something that is simple but not comprehensive. Mr. Molloy did a lot of work in his former role with groups and he might want to comment on this.