Frank Fahey (Galway West, Fianna Fail)

The Bill provides that the assessment officer will be independent, with responsibility for delivering an independent assessment of need for individuals. In addition, the assessment will be undertaken without regard to the cost of the service envisaged or the capacity of the executive to provide those services. The independence of this officer is essential to the process and is a response to a key concern of the disability interest groups, as I said this morning. It is equally essential that a liaison officer should be part of the executive involved in managing the needs of people with disabilities within the practical constraints applying from time to time. This is in keeping with the role of the liaison officer, which is to prepare a deliverable service statement.

The liaison officer will have a knowledge and understanding of service issues and the demands on them as well as of related resource implications and the capacity of the executive to respond in individual cases. In the light of the role envisaged for the officer in the Bill, it would be inappropriate to assign him or her the statutory independence proposed in this amendment. There will be no constraints on the liaison officer in doing his job within the HSE except the normal ones of resources, which I have outlined. He will be allowed, within the resource provisions, to make available the best service statement.

Regarding what Deputy Cowley has described as a resource-dependent Bill, also the main point of his last contribution, I put it to him that he has been an Independent Deputy here for two years. I have never yet seen him stand up in this House and say, since he is prepared to provide all kinds of services to all kinds of people, how he proposes to raise the money to pay for them.

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