Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail)

This is a policy I have followed throughout my ministerial career. In the normal course of events with an emerging issue, the relevant officials would seek a meeting with me, the issues and course of action would be discussed and a decision arrived at.

The recollections of people about whether something was mentioned in passing as part of other discussions has been considered in detail by the report. Even if every person shared exactly the same recollections, there is no suggestion that briefings amounted to a substantive treatment which would have allowed Ministers to know about the seriousness of the issue or to take action. The Opposition has been stating for some time that I and others must have known. This is a way of ignoring the full evidence of the information available to us. If the decision of the Opposition is to reject the findings of the report on this issue, let it say so in a clear way and there should be no mistake in understanding this. If we accept the contention of Opposition parties that Ministers must have known because of the information in this report, they are rejecting a central finding of the report. If they want to do this, they must then get down to the business of showing how exactly the same types of briefings, when involving Ministers of their parties, should be treated differently. If they are indicating that Ministers should be able to know about every issue and take action on the basis of "superficial" and "completely inadequate" briefings, let them say so.

The report also considers the issue of what would have happened had I and my predecessors been fully briefed. It has been suggested that we would have shied away from it because it was too sensitive. The report states the evidence does not support this as the required amendment is relatively uncomplicated and the idea that there should be such a contribution is widely accepted. In addition, it states: "In the context of the many difficult and controversial decisions taken by successive Governments and successive Ministers of Health over the years a legislative change on the lines required to, effectively, legitimise existing practice could not, plausibly, be regarded as one of undue political difficulty."

As I have previously stated at different times during my ministerial career, I have shown a full willingness to take on issues which were viewed as highly sensitive and showed failures over many years. For example, as Minister for Education and Science, I reversed the policy of the previous Government of ignoring issues of child abuse in State institutions. I also opened up the State's files and provided funding for groups whose aims involved questioning the role of the State. In this particular case, if I had been aware that an illegal charge was in place, I would have dealt with it.

As I have said in the past, everybody in the Department of Health and Children carries a large workload and there is generally no let-up in terms of major issues to be dealt with. As Mr. Travers notes: "The life and death nature of the issues with which it is concerned, the scale, the breadth and complexity of the policy agenda, the number of unpredictable events to be handled and the constant media and political attention all combine to produce an environment of immense organisational and individual work pressures in which the urgent constantly conspires to drive out the important." He further notes that this practice of charges for persons in long-stay care in health board institutions "was a case of 'good intentions' not being supported by the requisite legal foundations".

I strongly agree with the report's conclusions concerning the need to reform the operations of the Department. In this context, the report explicitly cites the structural reform programme I developed and helped to put in place as offering a "new beginning" for the Department. This was the intention of the programme, the most significant reform of the Department since its establishment. The Department must be given space to set strategies and oversee them rather than being constantly involved in minute issues of implementation.

The report shows a 28-year story of the failure to deal with a problem which could easily have been rectified. The issue should have been brought clearly to the attention of successive Ministers but was not. Having considered in detail all elements of the information given to Ministers, the report concludes that it was at most provided "at the most superficial of levels" and was "completely inadequate to what was required".

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