Dara Calleary (Mayo, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The Minister, Deputy Noonan, announced here yesterday evening that some people who have lost their discretionary medical cards will now have them returned. It is still not clear whether all people will have them returned and the process for return has not been clarified. This is a particularly dramatic U-turn for this Government, particularly when its members all spent 18 months denying that a cull was under way. I notice the Minister, Deputy James Reilly, was not in the House when the announcement was made and he is not here now. However, since the announcement was made, there still continues to be Government disarray on the issue. The Minister of State, Deputy Alex White, who told us a few weeks ago that there was no such thing as a discretionary medical card, has said it is a collective Cabinet responsibility, for which he had no part, and now we read reports in all of today's newspapers regarding last night's Fine Gael Parliamentary Party meeting where the Minister, Deputy Reilly, told the meeting that the handling of medical cards was a disaster. He further told those present that he sought repeatedly to address the medical card issue but apparently the political will from his Cabinet colleagues was not there until last week. We now have the Minister, Deputy Reilly, and the Minister of State, Deputy White, who are the Laurel and Hardy of this Government, passing the buck rather than taking responsibility for the whole fiasco.

The fiasco is outlined in this morning's edition of The Irish Timesin its coverage of the case of a family in Wicklow where a father has a rare cancer and a son has cerebral palsy and the family have been asked once again to resubmit documentation in regard to their medical card, a case that has been repeated hundreds, if not thousands, of times across the country as a direct result of the handling of this issue by the Minister, Deputy Reilly, and the Minister of State, Deputy White. This is only one case and the Minister and Minister of State are blaming someone else, and that someone else is the Minister, Deputy Howlin. All of the Fine Gael sources today are saying the lack of political will goes back to his desk and that he seems to be the person to whom the Minister, Deputy Reilly, is referring in regard to his inability to get buy-in to the solution of this problem.

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