Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I still cannot fathom why the Deputy always feels the need to misrepresent what I say in this House and what the Government says. Obviously, I stand over what I said yesterday in regard to me being briefed and I am still trying to get the documents around that. What I can say is that regarding a document that appeared in the newspapers yesterday in relation to 2016, we have confirmed from the Department of Health that I was not circulated on that document, and on the agreement between the Minister and the Attorney General's office, AGO, I was not the Minister who made that agreement; it was a 2014 agreement. As the Deputy may know, when civil servants talk about “Ministers”, they often talk about "the Minister" in the context of the corporation sole, not necessarily the person who was the Minister on the day.

However, that does not matter; that is just a sideshow. What matters are the issues the Deputy is raising now. In regard to the historic nursing home charges issue, I want to emphasise once again that it does not relate to anyone in nursing homes today or, indeed, in recent years. That is an important point of clarity that people in nursing homes today and their families will want to know. It relates to charges prior to the 2005-06 period and those matters were resolved prospectively when the nursing homes support scheme, the fair deal, was introduced by the Minister, Ms Harney, back in 2009. That created a universal system that sets out how people are entitled to nursing home care and what contributions they need to make.

The State - the taxpayer - has compensated those who had paid charges in public nursing homes to the tune of €480 million. That was the right thing to do, and it was done. In regard to private nursing homes, the situation is different; it is more complex, and that was explained at the time back in 2006. We do not accept that medical card patients ever had an unqualified entitlement to free private nursing home care. The advice from successive Attorneys General is clear that that is not an accepted position.

Even to this day, medical card patients either choose or are forced to go privately, and we do not reimburse them for their costs. Where we do pay for medical card patients to go privately, there is a system in place of prior approval. That is the position.

It was never the intention of the Government or the Oireachtas to confer a right to free private nursing home care on medical card patients. That is clear from the debates in the Dáil if the Deputy wants to look back at them. That does matter. What the Oireachtas intended and what Government policy was do matter.

Some cases have been settled with a financial settlement, but others have been settled without a financial settlement, and some cases were not settled at all, because they had been managed on a case-by-case basis pending a test case, which has never happened. There will be a report from the Attorney General on this to the Cabinet next week and I know the Department of Health is keen to report on it as well.

In relation to the other matter the Deputy raised, which is the disabled person's maintenance allowance, DPMA, this was paid between 1973 and 1996 under the Health Act 1970 by the former health boards. I am advised that the allowance, which could be and was used for food, heating, electricity, rent and so forth, was paid to people who could not provide for themselves. The policy position at the time - this is going back to the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s - rightly or wrongly, was that this money was no longer required as the individuals were living in State-funded residential care and those needs were being met. People with a disability who were resident in long-term care facilities did not receive this allowance after the first weeks in residential care.

In 1996, the allowance was renamed the disability allowance and responsibility for it was transferred to the Department of Social, Community and Family Affairs, as it was called at the time. Since 2007, it has been paid in full to people with disabilities living in long-term care, so this matter was resolved 15 years ago. However, the question that arose in 2009 was whether there should have been retrospection and back pay. It is an historical issue, a legacy issue, but to me it does appear different from the nursing homes charges issue. It appears different in substance because the legal advice is different and the legal advice and position became clearer after the High Court ruling. It is something we are going to look into over the next week or two and respond to further.

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