Alan Shatter (Dublin South, Fine Gael)

Does the Minister accept the authority comes under his remit and he funds it? Does he agree it was an outrageous misuse of public funds to spend €225,000 on reinforcing stereotypes of old people and not challenging them? Does he further agree this foolish and ill-conceived campaign could do nothing other than promote ageism as opposed to counteract it? Does he further accept putting up posters of elderly people throughout the country in bus shelters, on buses and in other locations with descriptions of them as a "burden", "grumpy", "forgotten" and "useless" can make no proper contribution to ensuring a lack of discrimination against old people and can only guarantee and ensure unthinking people will use those labels as a verbal means of putting old people down? Does the Minister agree many elderly people who saw these advertisements found them grossly offensive and distressing? Will he direct the Equality Authority to apply more common sense in future to the spending of public funds on promotional campaigns designed to end discrimination but which, if one applies common sense to them, can do nothing to resolve the problem they are supposed to address?

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