Ms Sinéad Lucey:

I do not think the you could legislate. The Senator raises a good point that, generally, retrospective legislation is not appropriate. That would be particularly so where you are imposing a retrospective liability. To provide a retrospective benefit to people would not fall foul of the same difficulties.

We have raised this issue because we have been contacted by people in this situation who have been watching the case and wondering whether it would bring any benefit to them or whether there might be some element of retrospectiveness to it. In fairness to those people, we just want to raise that issue at this point to see whether the Department could examine some kind of scheme that might acknowledge its loss. It might be historical at this stage but it does appear that there were cases of great hardship as a result of people not being able to access the scheme before now.