Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Can the Tánaiste explain to the public why successive Fianna Fáil- and Fine Gael-led Governments, including many he was a part of, have pursued a systematic strategy over many years of denying rights and entitlements to vulnerable people and to people who have been wronged by the State, often pursuing a very hostile, cynical legal strategy to deny people their rights? Vulnerable people in long-term residential care with disabilities were denied their disability allowances; before that we had women affected by CervicalCheck and scandals subjected to a very hostile legal strategy. Last night, we had the Government yet again excluding tens of thousands of mothers and children who were victims of the abuse by church and State in mother and baby homes, arbitrarily and unjustifiably excluded from the redress scheme. Then, of course, there is the scandal of the nursing homes fees wrongly levied on vulnerable, often elderly, unwell people. The Government has fought them every step of the way, legally and otherwise, to deny them their rights and entitlements and has used legal strategies to prevent them from getting those entitlements and to hush them up in instances where it was forced, because of legal action, to acknowledge the refunds to which they were entitled. I ask the Tánaiste this very particularly as he was Minister for Health between 2000 and 2004. In that year, the Report on Nursing Home Subventions was laid before him containing 70 pages detailing how successive Governments knew that the fees being charged in nursing homes were illegal, that there was no legal basis for them-----

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