Feargal Quinn (Independent)

I welcome the Minister of State to the House. It must be somewhat embarrassing for the Government that, for the second successive week, this House is considering a Bill the purpose of which is to undo a mistake which could have been avoided in the first place. While I have no particular wish to create more embarrassment for the Government, I would like to focus my contribution on the somewhat creaky nature of the administrative machine that seems to operate in this country.

This Bill became a necessity because of a serious and long-standing administrative failure, a failure that went on for a much longer period than that covered in the redress scheme created under the Bill. Since the 1970s, the twilight years of many old people were made more difficult than they needed to have been because they did not get their due entitlements under legislation. Very many of these people are long since dead and there is nothing we can do to redress the wrong that was done to them.

I wish to be precise about the nature of this wrong. I would never argue that older people in State care should not contribute to some extent to the costs of their maintenance if they are able to do so. This is not the issue. However, what was wrong in this case was that money was taken from people illegally. Not to put too fine a point on it, this money was stolen from them. Even worse, the entity which stole from them was the State itself, the very body that should have been standing up for them and defending their rights.

I am profoundly worried by this blatant instance of the State breaking its own laws because I think it has the direst implications for the health of our democracy. Above all else, a democracy essentially concerns rule by law, a rule which should apply to the State as well as the citizen. The principle that the law applies to everyone is the strongest defence of all the freedoms we hold dear.

I am not suggesting that any member of the Government or these Houses wishes to set aside the law or act contrary to it but the fact remains that in this case all the powers of the State were harnessed over a period of many years to break the law. What made it even worse was that the people who suffered under this illegal activity were among the weakest and most vulnerable in our society. We know about this so I am repeating what has been said before.

We should be so concerned about this lapse that we should take very good care that it never happens again. Yet, I see no evidence of any action that will ensure this outcome. The Bill before us seeks to make redress to some of those who were offended against but it does nothing to reduce the possibility of a similar mistake happening again. I would like to hear the Minister of State's views but it appears that this is the case.

This was basically an administrative error and much of it was compounded over the years by political neglect from successive Ministers. We have a mechanism in place that is meant to address such errors and prevent their recurrence, namely, the Office of the Ombudsman. To their eternal credit, this particular problem was identified by more than one Ombudsman and signalled to the political establishment and to the public in the appropriate way. Yet, despite all this signalling, no notice was taken of it by anybody and so, year after year, the State went on blithely breaking its own law.

The fact that this happened and was allowed to happen surely reveals a fundamental defect in our system. We have burdened the Ombudsman with the responsibility for identifying administrative defects but, incredibly, we have burdened nobody with the responsibility for seeing that such defects are speedily addressed once they have been identified. I would like to hear the Minister of State's views on this matter. We can and, hopefully, will pass this Bill but we cannot buy our way out of this problem so easily. Until we address the issue directly, we are just asking for the situation to happen again and again.

I look forward to hearing the Minister's response and will listen intently to it. The Bill must and, I hope, will be passed but I would like to find out how we can take steps to ensure such a scenario never happens again.