Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

However, I think we would all agree that it is a major barrier. I would have much preferred it if the income limits for the medical card rather than those for the GP card had gone up. If you have a fixed sum of money, you have to make choices in this arrangement. The medical card guidelines are absolutely ridiculous.

I am interested in a wider issue. Other than medical assessment for ability to work, much of the social welfare code is based on money because it is easy to measure. It has an attractiveness because it is easy to measure. With partial capacity, we tried to medicalise people's ability to work. I am not sure it was that successful.

If there are large numbers going for it, there will be a large number of appeals or whatever because it is a subjective judgment.

This leads to my next question around the costs of disability. The witness focused on this issue big time and it is one to which I have not found an administrative solution in my own head. All of us, as public representatives, deal with people with disabilities of all levels, from people with profound disabilities who cannot walk or talk or are incontinent and so forth to paraplegics, people in wheelchairs and people who, on the surface, walk into my office and receive a disability payment, but physically, are not any different from the rest of the disability issues. There is a huge difference in the cost of disability between the various groups.

I have not found a solution to this in my own head and I am anxious to find a one. Ms Phelan talked quite eloquently about intrusion into people's lives. How can this assessment of the cost of disability be done in a graded fashion - if it is going to be done - without being very intrusive and leading to an endless appeals system? Looking again at appeals on disability allowance, I bet they were not about money. I bet that most of them were about the ability to work or not to work. Those are simple black and white cases. Maybe they are not simple, but relatively simple. In the context of trying to assess the cost of disability, have there been any solutions put forward as to how this would be measured in a way that would not be hugely long and drawn out with cost delays and without being intrusive into people's lives? I am totally in favour of the concept. I am 100% in favour of the concept but the challenge is to convert that concept into an operable scheme in a Government Department across a whole State. I wonder can the witnesses guide us in that regard.