Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)

I could get that detail. My understanding is they are medical practitioners. On that matter, the Chief Medical Officer, the person with whom I mainly have had dealings in the Department, is a very fine medical practitioner and I understand is very experienced in occupational medicine, and I have found him to be a very fair minded person. He is working to try see how all of these procedures can be improved. He has done a great deal of work, even on the design of the certification so that we manage to get the information we require to make good decisions. It is partly medical and partly also related to the design of forms, etc., so that the information we get in is perhaps better than it was in the past.

While I am taking the Deputy into another subject here, I genuinely feel this is an important matter where we all can make progress. As he is probably aware, often doctors give a certificate to an applicant for all sorts of schemes only outlining the medical condition. However, as I stated in the Dáil committee today, schemes often have an issue, not only on what is the actual medical condition but on whether, for example, a person applying for carer's allowance needs full-time care and attention or a person applying for disability allowance or illness benefit is capable for work taking into account his or her qualifications, experience, etc., depending on one's qualifications and experience, and the type of work one does. A roofer in a wheelchair could not operate, but the Deputy and I know other people in wheelchairs who are in very senior roles because they have desk jobs. From my personal experience as a Deputy, one of the problems up to now has been that it was not enough to get the medical assessment, but that the next issue was whether the person was capable for work in the opinion of the original doctor taking into account whether he or she was labouring or had a desk job, and the kind of work concerned. There is work we can do to speed up the process by trying to get that information in the first round and save all of us, particularly the applicants for our schemes, much heartache and grief.

I sometimes hear people saying that the Department is holding back for some financial reason. I can assure the Deputy nothing is further from the truth for a great many reasons which he can figure out. With the amount of money involved, if the allowance is given in the end, there is no saving for the Department because we give the arrears to the date of application. There is no messing like that going on; everything is done to the staff's best ability. There is no hidden agenda.

That said, we can do the job better and the Department is open to doing so. I have been very impressed going around to the country to the various offices. I was down in Killarney recently where we spent two hours going through all of the mechanisms there discussing how we can have better delivery mechanisms right throughout the Department. My experience of the staff is that they are definitely up for it. They are fantastic staff committed to the work they do and I believe we can do things better in the future.

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