David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The 2011 memo which was published identified 9,000 people with disabilities who may also have been wrongly charged with an estimated liability of €350 million. Yesterday at the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Health, the Secretary General of the Department of Health said he has seen a database that underpins the figure of €350 million, which he believes may be too high as not all of those people may have had entitlement. However, he accepts that some people may have had an entitlement. The 2011 memo is quite explicit in stating that there are and were people at the time who were analogous to those 512 people in those three homes who got compensation, fully settled, provided for by the Department. Those are the three homes the Minister referred to. The memo was very clear. There were other residents with the exact same entitlement. The problem is they never applied under the scheme because they were told they were not entitled. They did not appeal decision because obviously they did not apply in the first place. We need to establish who these people are and if they had a liability under the scheme, as those other 512 people did. We should seek them out and make sure they are properly compensated.

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