Anne Rabbitte (Galway East, Fianna Fail)
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I thank the Deputy for his question. What have I done? In the last month I met FEDVOL and the team, including Alison Harnett, about pay. It was solely about pay around the section 39s. The figure for pay restoration is €20 million. That is required. Now I will hand it over to the relevant. I know where I am in the asking process but I will hand it over to the relevant. Pay is a policy issue for the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform but I know from a disability point of view what the cost is. In my first budget I did pay restoration and I allocated €10 million for that. I have started it and do not intend to stop without having equality. As the Minister of State going into the Department with responsibility for equality I believe in that equality across all of it.

It is important to say sometimes when we talk about the PDS teams and the number of HSE and the other leads on it, we might think everything is all section 39s, whereas is it is not. Eight of the teams are section 38 and four of them are section 39. It is important to contextualise that but it is a wider issue. The Deputy talked about Cooleens House. It has six rooms and provides enormous capacity to provide respite in north Cork. The issue there, yet again, like with what I said in reply to Deputy Murnane O'Connor, is the recruitment of the person in charge, PIC. They are able to find staff within the framework and that is exactly what we have in west Cork in the Beara Breifne. The reason the house had to be closed was we could not find a PIC. We are now identifying why respite might not be functioning and that is two houses I have note of in Cork, with one in the north and one in the south and it is to do with the PIC. Earlier this year I met the Fórsa-SIPTU-INMO congress at one particular meeting. I can tell members I knew my objective coming out of it, let us put it like that. That was about the section 39s. They play a phenomenal role. I have asked Ms Harnett from FEDVOL if she can tell me the difference between the work the section 39s do and the section 38s and the HSE and there is no difference in the work or the delivery of the work that they do.