Mr. John Dunne:

One would have all that certified. That is true. The idea of a medical assessment unit could have been a model in the context of the Government's focus on centralising services and achieving economies. There was a recent High Court review of a decision to refuse a domiciliary care allowance under the old regime. The Department is still reviewing it. The core issue on which the judge criticised the Department was that a medical report from the GP had been disregarded without anybody having met the person about whom the report had been written. The officials read the report saying what the person needed, decided they did not believe it and put it away.

If one was to ask the chief medical officer in the Department of Social Protection how that happens, he would say, quite simply, that he just does not have the staff to do it. That is a perfectly legitimate argument. I cannot come in here and ask that another 50 medical examiners be appointed to the Department of Social Protection, but maybe there is another way of looking at it.