Brendan Ryan (Labour)

I second the amendment. It is to a degree ironic that the newspapers are filled with reports of the body established by the Government to consider ways to encourage enterprise. Among the body's conclusions is the need for agile and responsive Government. Where agile and responsive Government are considered, the issues of delay and the unwillingness of Governments of a variety of complexions to accept that decisions must be taken within a timeframe arise. Governments seem always to resist the idea that a positive or negative response should be provided within a clear timescale. Other problems involve services the provision of which requires the intervention of more than one Department or agency and the failure of the State to institutionalise a mechanism to deal with such scenarios.

During my recent marathon tour of Munster, I visited a centre for people with learning disabilities located in a town in the Southern Health Board area whose hinterland included Mid-Western Health Board areas. The people there were tearing their hair out because the Southern Health Board used resources to support people with disabilities one way and the Mid-Western Health Board operated a different system. A great deal of the time of the people running the centre was taken up doing two different things for two different health boards with replication of activity simply because the boards could not work out a common approach to dealing with people with disabilities. This is one of our institutional problems. I ran into it 20 years ago when I first arrived here full of vim and vigour about homelessness to find the then Departments of Health and the Environment playing a wonderful game of ping-pong about which was responsible for the issue. The consequence of this ping-pong was that nobody was responsible.

While I listened with interest to what the Minister of State had to say, I fear from my experience and what I have heard of Senator Ulick Burke's experience that where there is divided responsibility there will be no responsibility. I do not claim to be an authority in this area with which my colleague, Senator Tuffy, is dealing but there is no doubt given the experience of us all that while it seems a wonderful idea to divide responsibility by drawing in several Departments, the result will be that nobody is responsible. Senator Ulick Burke's amendment is worthy of the Minister's consideration even at this late point.