Liam Twomey (Wexford, Fine Gael)

I have no difficulty giving way to my colleagues in the Labour Party and will withdraw most of my amendments if we can take the family home issue out of this. During Leaders' Questions the Taoiseach acknowledged that elderly patients will have to sell their homes because the HSE may refuse the subvention. He agreed with what we have said all along that elderly patients may have to sell their homes. This is basically a property grab by Fianna Fáil which the Minister of State fully acknowledged this evening after five months of trying to get it out of him.

In a press release issued in October, the Minister of State said the income threshold above which subvention may be refused was €36,000 and the principal residence value above which subvention may be refused was €500,000 in the Dublin area and €300,000 outside the Dublin area. The press release and this legislation state "may be refused". Every Deputy will have come across at least one case in the past ten months where people have been refused subvention on the grounds of this provision even though it is quite clear it states "may be refused". When the Taoiseach said during Leaders' Questions today that a person "may be refused" subvention, he was basically saying that one could read it as "will be refused" subvention.

What is coming out on the final Stages of the Bill is that Fianna Fáil will take houses from elderly people. There are no two ways about it; it is now official Government policy. That is the only clarity we have received in respect of this legislation in the past five months. As has been pointed out, patients have already had to sell their homes to pay for nursing home care. It has happened at least three times not to constituents of mine but to patients of mine in the past two to three years. The most despicable aspect of this is that when they have exhausted their assets, they have received no assistance from the HSE. In fact, we have had to go begging and scraping for them to get a contract bed when their funds were exhausted.

This legislation and the way the Government is behaving is a race to the bottom in terms of looking after elderly people into the future. The Minister of State will not apply consistent standards across the country on the back of this legislation, rather it will apply consistently low standards. He said the amount people receive in subvention is unequal throughout the country and that some HSE areas give more. It looks as if the only thing he wishes to give is less subvention to every elderly person in the country.

Deputy Higgins raised constitutional issues in this regard. We saw what happened with the former health boards when the issue of illegal nursing home charges cropped up. When people said they would challenge the charges in the courts, their fees were paid and they were told they would not be charged. This is exactly how the Government will respond when court cases are brought in this instance. It will suddenly drop the notion of expecting patients to pay. It will buy off those it believes might cause it a problem but will attempt to screw every other elderly person from whom it believes it can get property. That is what the Government is doing and it is shameful. What is even more shameful is that Fianna Fáil does not have the guts to admit it is taking people's houses from them through the back door.

If the Government had the courage of its convictions, which I doubt it has, it would have first brought forward its policy on funding care of the elderly into the future and would have told us what was to happen. We have waited long enough for its policy. I have press statements from the former Minister, Deputy Martin, dating back as far as 2003 stating that a Government decision on the O'Shea report, the Mercer report and funding care of the elderly into the future was imminent. In 2003 it told us it would be fair but by 2006, the Government has obviously made up its mind exactly how it will fund care of the elderly into the future; it will take their houses from them. The Minister of State more or less said that when he said the only aspect which worried him was how much it will cost. He made direct comparisons between how much it cost in 1993 with how much it costs now. He does not give a hoot about equality, rights and how elderly patients will be treated in the future. The only aspect which bothers the Government is the bottom line.

The Tánaiste and Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform said there were so many billions of euro sloshing about in the Department of Finance that the Government did not know what to do with them. Obviously, it has changed its mind and has decided that the only way to keep the coffers full is to penalise elderly people and take their homes from them. I will withdraw amendments Nos. 8 and 12.

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