Pauline Tully (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

We need full disclosure and openness from the Government and those who were in positions of power in regard to the Government’s heartless political strategy to withhold and deny disability payments to those in residential care who were entitled to it.

This must involve the full co-operation of and transparency on the part of the Government, including the acceptance of any requests from committees for Ministers to address the matter.

The practice of successive Governments from the 1970s to the 1990s was to deny disability allowance payments to those in institutional care. This affected thousands of people in up to 140 institutional care homes. It has been estimated that somewhere between 4,000 and 10,000 people were affected during the period in which this payment was made by the Department of Health and another 2,700 after the then Department of Social and Family Affairs took over the payment. Many of these people had profound disabilities and relied on the State to care for them and to advocate on their behalf. Instead of advocating for these people, the strategy of successive Governments has been to conceal, deny, cover up and delay rather than protecting these citizens, who were often extremely vulnerable. It was a callous and calculated strategy to deny the most vulnerable their rights and one of paying up for those with the resources to take legal action and to punch down against those who did not. As shocking as these revelations are, they should not come as too big a surprise if we consider the other scandals in which successive Governments down through the years have tried to deny people rights by concealing information and settling on the steps of the court. I think of those affected by thalidomide, sodium valproate, the CervicalCheck scandal, the mother and baby home redress scheme and, of course, the nursing home fees.

A Government memo from 1997 estimated that claims from those affected could cost €350 million to €700 million before legal costs were taken into account. In 2006, a case was taken on behalf of a woman who had been receiving a disability payment prior to her admittance to a psychiatric facility in 1983. That payment was stopped within weeks of her being admitted. The case centred on the claim that the regulations that led to the discontinuation of her disability allowance payment were in conflict with the law and ultra viresand that they had no legal standing as a result. The case was settled in 2008. If, as the current Attorney General concluded yesterday, the State had no positive legal duty to make retrospective payments in respect of the disabled persons maintenance allowance, why were this case and others settled by the State? A further joint memo for Cabinet was prepared in 2009 by the then Minister for Health, Mary Harney, and the then Minister for Social and Family Affairs, Mary Hanafin, which assessed the potential implications of the case. Two members of the current Cabinet were also members of Cabinet when this memo was prepared and brought forward for discussion, namely, Deputy Micheál Martin, then Minister for Foreign Affairs, and Deputy Eamon Ryan, then Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources. Three other current Members from Government parties were also Ministers in 2009 when this memo was prepared for Cabinet, namely, Deputies O'Dea, Ó Cuív and Brendan Smith. Do they stand over the denial of these payments? Do they stand over the strategy to conceal, deny, cover up and delay rather than protecting vulnerable citizens?

In 2011, when the Fianna Fáil-Green Party coalition was replaced by Fine Gael and Labour, another brief was prepared on this issue. In the Dáil last week, the Taoiseach said that the legal advice regarding the disability allowance suggested that the State did not have a leg to stand on. How does this square with the conclusions of the Attorney General? The Taoiseach is reported as having said that the Government will do "“whatever is legally required and morally just”. Will the Government do so now?

Pauline Tully (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

The Taoiseach stated that while the Government has a responsibility to do what is right, it also has a responsibility to protect the taxpayer. The Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, Deputy O'Gorman, when speaking on "Morning Ireland" stated that the need to protect State resources had obscured the need to protect the vulnerable. He is reported as saying, "When the State is subject to legal actions, when it adopts legal positions, I think it's really important that those positions are influenced by the obligation that the State has to some of its most vulnerable citizens". That is the approach I urge the Government to adopt. I feel this is not about protecting public money. The State did not fight the church in court to get it to pay for all of the abuse it inflicted on children. It did not fight the suppliers of faulty cement blocks or the builders of shoddy apartments for their mistakes, or negligence, as I should say. It did not make them pay. The taxpayers shouldered the burden in those instances. The State will not make the strong pay but, if you are vulnerable or poor, you are deceived and robbed.

This State signed up to the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, UNCRPD, in 2018. We should be bound by the commitments within that convention. I hope that the two Ministers will be guided by its contents as they carry out their review. I will speak on some of the convention's articles. Article 12 states that persons with disabilities should be given "the support they may require in exercising their legal capacity." Article 13 states that states parties should "ensure effective access to justice for persons with disabilities on an equal basis with others". People with disabilities also have a right to information. Article 23 specifies that people with disabilities have the right "to social protection and to the enjoyment of that right without discrimination on the basis of disability" and that the State "shall take appropriate steps to safeguard and promote the realization of this right". That was denied to the people in question. I know the UNCRPD was only signed in 2018. Now that we have signed and ratified it, we have an obligation to live up to these commitments.