Regina Doherty (Meath East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Nobody was prioritised. Letters were sent out randomly and nobody was particularly selected because of their age, the length of time or anything like that.

The ambition is for us to ensure that we carry out reviews of all 90,000 cases as quickly as we can.

In response to Deputy Aindreas Moynihan regarding the staging of the recruitment, that is how long it took us to find staff. It certainly was not our ambition to start off with 60 staff, before increasing the number to 80 and then 120. I am completely satisfied that the staffing levels are sufficient to ensure this process will be completed in a couple of months. It will certainly not take anywhere near as long as the Deputy suggested. I am also adamant that I will not tell the Deputy or anybody else that we are finishing on 1 June when people still not have given us the information required to allow their cases to be reviewed. In many cases, we can probably do reviews based on the information we have. Those cases are easier to review but there are many gaps where we do not have the information and that requires co-operation and information flow back and forth. To be fair and truthful, we had anticipated being able to do the vast majority of these reviews online, meaning we expected that if I emailed the Deputy today, he would email me back tomorrow. However, this approach does not quite work with some members of our older population and there is a delay in receiving responses when we send out requests for information.

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