James Geoghegan (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael)

I echo what Deputy Kenny said. What the “RTÉ Investigates" programme identified was traumatising. That is the only way to describe it. People who had worked all their lives were subjected to trauma. Sometimes it was the older people and in other cases it was their children or their partners who looked after their future life planning, and who put them into a nursing home that had been given a clean bill of health by the State watchdog, HIQA. These people have been utterly failed by nursing home providers in the first instance. I would love to hear from the nursing home providers. Perhaps the Comptroller and Auditor General could advise us on that. I would love to invite them to appear before this committee, but, ultimately, I suspect that the only people we can probably get in here will be those from HIQA. The bottom line is that there are lots of questions for HIQA that have not been answered. We should do it in the full glare of the public eye. HIQA should be invited in here at the earliest opportunity to discuss these issues.