David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I will support the amendments. I met HIQA representatives regarding these amendments a number of weeks ago. They made some interesting points that surprised me. The first was that they believed most of the powers being made available through these amendments are already available to HIQA. I got the sense that they did not see great value in what is being proposed.

I was a member of the Covid committee that met in this Chamber for some time. For me, one of the issues that arose during the Covid pandemic is that there are serious incidents - the Minister talked about specific incidents - that HIQA obviously can and should investigate but there are also issues that amount to neglect. That can be subjective but there were many complaints where a family member may have complained that his or her loved one was neglected in a nursing home. There are examples I could go into but I will not because these related to individual issues in nursing homes, some of which were brought to the Minister's attention by some of his Government colleagues, as he knows. The problem was there was no power to initiate investigations by safeguarding teams, social care teams or HIQA into individual issues of neglect. That was a problem. It does not seem this is captured by these amendments. The Minister might clarify that.

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