Tony Kett (Fianna Fail)

I share some of Senator Tuffy's concerns on this issue. The Minister of State based his Committee Stage argument on the fact that the assessor would be wholly independent, which I accept. However, I am concerned about what would happen in the case of an assessor being incompetent and making a hames of an assessment for one reason or another. This brings me to the issue of the skills of an assessor or assessment team. From where will the assessors be recruited? I would hope they would be drawn from the corps of people that work in this area and that they would not be people from the HSE who have no skills in the disability sector. I hope that when we begin to recruit assessors and liaison officers, especially assessors, they are drawn from the corps of people who work within the system and know the disability sector.

Would it be possible for a liaison officer to be an administrative person? Liaison officers would merely fulfil the terms of the assessment in so far as they could. Would they require competence to make a judgment on an assessment, to draw it down into a service statement or could this be done by a person with administrative skills as there would be a financial implication?