Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Hello to everyone from Ballymun in the Visitors Gallery.

Yesterday he Taoiseach admitted to the Dáil that he was, in fact, briefed on Government legal strategy on nursing home charges. This was 24 hours after he stated that he was not involved in the strategy and sought to put distance between himself and it. Not only did he admit he was briefed and that his predecessors and successors in government were also briefed, but he also stated that he stands foursquare behind this plan, this strategy. His expressed view is that this was, and is, a good Government strategy - a heartless plan designed by Government to hardball elderly, vulnerable people and their families forced to pay nursing home charges they should not have been paying; a strategy to stop them getting their money back, to prevent them from vindicating their rights and to keep things quiet.

Last night, we learned on RTÉ's "Prime Time" that another cold and heartless Government strategy was in place to remove allowances - the disability maintenance payment - from people with disabilities in residential care. This was a Government decision that was deemed to be unlawful. The documentation from 2009 shows that the Government of the day knew that these citizens were entitled to their allowance but used their vulnerability to prevent them from getting their payment.

This was another political strategy put in place to stop ordinary people wronged by Government from taking their case to court. Why was this? The view of the Attorney General at the time was that the State would be unable to defend these cases successfully and so, another strategy to conceal, to deny, to cover up and to protect the Government instead of protecting vulnerable citizens. In fact, this secret document set out that a comprehensive trawl of all of those who had been illegally stripped of their disability maintenance payment should not be done because, it said, “such an exercise would be unlikely to escape media attention or speculation and could generate further claims which otherwise would not have been made”. Worse still, the Minister for Health of the day and, indeed, the entire Cabinet, endorsed this strategy. Of course, it was endorsed again by the 2011 Government, of which the Taoiseach was part, because it was reflected in the memo I discussed with him yesterday.

The story of these Government strategies is a sordid tale of successive Governments involving Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, the Labour Party and the late Progressive Democrats actively working against the interests of some of our most vulnerable citizens. Families were forced to use private nursing homes because of the failure of Government to provide places within the public system. These families were ripped off, with many forced to work into their 70s to just get by, in some cases on less than €30 a week. Now, we see a mirror image of this political strategy adopted by Government after Government against citizens with disabilities who are dependent on the State to look after them, to vindicate their rights and to protect them. These were citizens, many of whom lived in sheltered environments and who may not have had the capacity to initiate their claim. All of this has caused real hurt, real trauma and real hardship for many people; people who needed the Government to stand up for them instead of Governments facing them down and fighting them tooth and nail, at every turn, to deny them things they were entitled to. The human cost has been heavy and deep.

Does the Taoiseach believe that this Government strategy set out in a memo from 2009, and used against people with disabilities, was a legitimate strategy for Government? Is that a legitimate Government strategy? Does the Taoiseach stand by that? Does he call this also a good plan and a good strategy from Government?

See this speech in context