Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)
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I thank the witnesses for their presentations. It seems that one of the major problems is getting people to avail of services. One of the major challenges I see all the time is the bureaucratic barriers to accessing services. Applying for a medical card for anybody is a very difficult task because the amount of paperwork needed for even the simplest application is incredible, so think of the barrier for somebody who finds reading and writing difficult. We need to cut to the chase and say that there are significant barriers to accessing mainstream services and we need to simplify that. I listened with interest to what my Senator colleague said. I do not know whether it is as simple as ensuring everything is accessed through an ethnic identifier but something must happen to make access easier. I would be interested in hearing the witnesses' views on that.

Is there a committee within the Department that monitors the €10 million and do Travellers sit on that committee? The reason I ask this question is because, especially in times of financial pressure, people in organisations are geniuses at manipulating money. One concern I have is that some of that €10 million is being used as replacement money. It is being spent on Travellers but in a way that replaces money that should be have been spent on Travellers as members of society anyway. In other words, is it truly additional or did the Department, during the bad times, start using it to replace other moneys and services, counting it as Traveller services because a Traveller availed of a mainstream service he or she should have received anyway? I have seen this happen. There is need for close monitoring of that.

If the witnesses from the Department think I am being suspicious, I have seen a lot of things happen in times of pressure. The argument will be made. I will give a concrete example. I introduced CLÁR, which was a scheme for very specific geographic areas. The next thing that happened was that all sorts of services, including hospitals, that were way outside these areas were telling me that they provided services to the people within the areas and were asking for some of that money. Therefore, we need a monitoring committee that would include the people receiving the service to make sure the €10 million is really an extra €10 million on top of the normal services all of us as citizens are invited to avail of. I would be interested in finding out what structures have been put place by the Department to monitor that spend. I trust everybody and I trust nobody. I think everybody needs to be monitored. Will the witnesses give us the 2008 budget compared with what is available - the €10 million mentioned here?

There is another issue that I am concerned about. In one way, I laud that they are trying to help the Travellers at 40 because they are aged ten years beyond a person of 50 in the settled community but a more fundamental issue that we must keep coming back to is, why are they ten years older at 40 than the settled population at 50. It comes back to what all the statistics tell us. All the statistics show that people who are unemployed, in bad housing, etc. go to doctors more, go to hospitals more, get ill more often and die much younger, and that most of our health outcomes as a society are not a reflection on the health service in the first place. The biggest determinant of outcomes is not the health service in the first place. Many in the so-called middle classes go to the doctor less, take less medicine and live much longer. The reason is a thing called "lifestyle". What determines lifestyle? One hundred and fifty years ago, the biggest killers were water-borne diseases. Thankfully, we eliminated those more or less in the western world. That is lifestyle rather than pure medicine. We are still bad at housing. We are still bad at unemployment. There is good data in the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection on the effect of unemployment.