Professor Orla Hardiman:

I shall make a parting comment. In terms of accountability and transparency, we have a system whereby we award people access to a wide range of community services - patchy though they may be - but it is completely non-transparent, the discretionary component is unclear and is based on financial hardship. We want to know exactly how it works because we want to test the system. It has caused a huge amount of damage to our fellow citizens who have chronic conditions, encounter huge financial hardship and are denied or repeatedly asked to submit and resubmit information, as seen in the transcript. We would like to know the metric applied and who makes the decisions because we want a transparent system.