John Dolan (Independent)
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I must say at the outset that it is ironic that we are having this discussion today. There was decision in the Cabinet yesterday to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. We have had lots of similar news stories for several years. The Government made a decision that the convention is to be ratified in the next several weeks or the next month, and the committee is discussing something with two aspects.

The first aspect concerns what happened eight, nine or ten years ago. If one is asked to take 5%, 6% or 7% off a budget, and staffing accounts for 80% of one's budget, one cannot say the saving will not come from staff. It cannot come from anywhere else.

We are in this room for one reason. We are all interested and enjoined in the provision of a public service, regardless of the governance of the entities that provide it. I have heard the angst experienced by those caring for people who have conditions expressed very strongly by Ms Mo Flynn and Mr. Paul Bell . They are close to the patients and their families. I respect that, and I appreciate it being put to the committee.

We do not have people with disabilities in the room. We have heard representatives of organisations on both sides strongly contend that persons with disabilities are the focal point of this issue. It is worth remembering that this is about real people, people who have difficult lives quite apart from the services they require.

I have a few questions. What happens? There seems to be a go-slow on this issue, one that is being expressed in different ways. The organisations represented here are told to trot off to the Workplace Relations Commission. Meanwhile, the entities that actually control the money bag have not been turning up. It is decided that the process must be undergone, so those involved dance around it. That has been going on for a year or more, probably for longer.

I have a question for the organisations represented here. In this arrangement contracts are signed, stipulating that in exchange for X, their members must do Y for Z people, and the service must be up to a certain standard. The Health Information and Quality Authority, HIQA, is rightly scrutinising performance. What happens if the providers cannot deliver the service? It strikes me that this cannot be fudged. There are standards. The service providers will have to say that they cannot do this anymore. If that is true, what happens then? I would like someone to explain that to me. What happens in the context of the obligation of the State to continue to provide the service to those people?

This issue is a continuation of pay cuts in 2009, 2010, 2011 and so on. There were organisations that were funded under sections 39 and 38 before that, however. What is different? How were things managed prior to that? I know that was the era of the social partnership. This certainly did not seem to be the hot and fraught topic that it now is.