David Norris (Independent)

I would like another minute and 30 seconds. I hope the Minister has received a copy of this report and that he will read it. It contains many graphs and so on, which I do not particularly like, but there is also the human face. There are six case histories in the report. One, for example, concerns a woman who applied for a one-parent family payment. She was denied on the grounds that she had made insufficient attempts to get maintenance. She did not know what that phrase meant. She felt she had done everything she could. It turned out that they wanted her to get a court order for maintenance but she did not want to do that for the very human and understandable reason that her husband was violent. He was still in the home and she was afraid that if she applied for a court order she would be whacked again. It is not right that she should be forced to do something that would jeopardise her well-being.

Problems sometimes arise as a result of a conflict between the claimant's own medical opinion and the opinion of the medical assessor. In one case, a woman turned up three times for a medical assessment. The first time the medical assessor did not turn up. The second time he turned up but he did not have the necessary equipment to measure her disability. The third time he gave her a cursory examination. That is not appropriate.

I ask the Acting Chairman to allow me to mention the final case. I raised a similar case some years ago in the Seanad successfully and the Minister at the time was compassionate. It is about the way in which one entitlement is subtracted from another so that people get the minimum payment. The case concerns disability allowance.