Mary Harney (Dublin Mid West, Progressive Democrats)

The legislation will be to hand in this session, as I have already stated. It has proved to be extraordinarily complex legislation for two reasons. First, there are legal issues around wards of court and second, around the private accounts of those in institutional care and whether the institutions are agents of them. The Comptroller and Auditor General will have things to say about that. That has involved very complex issues that have taken longer to resolve than anyone anticipated.

With regard to the charges, up to 70,000 people are involved, 40,000 or 50,000 of whom are dead. The PIAB was established by this House a number of years ago and has outsourced all of its administration to a company based in Cork. Last year the board made 20,000 payments, for an average of €30 per payment. There is no doubt the health service administration could do the job, but it would completely clog up the system for years. The administration would have to handle a volume of cases as high as 70,000, check the records to determine how long people were in institutions and so forth. That is very different to paying everybody €2,000. If everybody was to be paid the same amount, it would not be such a big issue, but clearly if one has to go through each case, try to establish how much each person is owed and apply interest, it becomes a mammoth task. That is why we sought outside assistance but clearly we are not going to pay large sums for that. If it cannot be done for a reasonable amount, then it will have to be done internally. However, the PIAB model is a good one and has worked extraordinarily well, with 20,000 claims paid in one year, using the outsourcing model with a company in Cork.

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