Brendan Ryan (Labour)

If the people coming before the Residential Institutions Redress Board were not the least articulate and most wounded members of society, somebody would have taken the time to ensure they were not being misled about their fees. It is a bit rich for the board to now say that the Law Society should have sternly warned its members.

The board should have courageously advised the victims that all costs and expenses were being covered. It is astonishing the board never thought to make this explicitly clear to people and to say to them that if anybody tried to do anything else they should revert to the board and it would address the problem. I would have thought that was part of its work.

Both these cases make manifest the way in which in our affluent society there is still one state of law for the rich and another and much more vulnerable state of law for the poor, the vulnerable and the excluded. At this stage we need to talk about what we are going to do with affluence in Ireland. Are we going to allow 25% fall behind and 75% live in luxury?

I do not wish to outline the figures for acute hospital beds but there are only five countries in the world that have fewer acute hospital beds, two of which are Finland and Sweden and the others are Mexico, Turkey and the United States. We have been told there are enough acute hospital beds in Ireland. The real question is whether we are building a health service to emulate Finland and Sweden or Mexico, Turkey and the United States — one based on equality, the other based on manifest inequality. I urge the Leader at some time in the future, not today, to arrange a debate on the inequalities in Irish society. We have had one human tragedy and one appalling attempt to exploit the most vulnerable in society. In both cases to which I have referred institutional Ireland failed people. A system that was meant to manage the health service turned out to have no management. This raises the question of responsibility.

The chief executive of the Health Service Executive lectured politicians this morning. None of us is perfect. He said it would be better to focus on what is best for people's health. By talking about this case, that is precisely what the political system is doing. Were it not for the capacity of politicians to raise this issue, we would have to wait eight weeks for any response to this awful tragedy.