Ms Patricia Rickard-Clarke:

The Act is about making sure the voice of the person is heard. Culturally, we are not in that space yet. There is a lot of training and education to be done in that regard. On the implementation of the Act, there is again a serious deficit in training and understanding among the professions to change from the 1871 legislation to the current legislation and current thinking on human rights. There are again many people who have not planned in advance. We have run public awareness programmes on these issues over recent years.

To again come back to regulations, we had a strong response to our campaign on advance healthcare directives. A register has been set up in the Decision Support Service. We need the Minister for Health to make a regulation to operationalise that so people can register their advance healthcare directives. We have been asking for that for a number of years. It does not amount to much.

Around the country, certain groups of people can make an application to the court while others, such as the HSE, must first make ex parte applications. That is a court application. In publishing Voice Matters recently, Sage Advocacy pointed out that those ex parte applications for consent to make an application should be made to the country registrar to speed things up. In some counties, the court does not meet for three to six months. If it is adjourned or whatever, there are significant delays. There are things like that.

We also need an assisted decision-making capacity forum to be set up. This would get people together to look at the issues, the deficits and what needs to be done. Again, there is training online but you really need in-house in-person training and discussion of cases and issues. We need to achieve a significant change of culture. Families who collected the pension and spent it as family money do not think their adult child has a right to make their own decisions on issues like that.