Brendan Ryan (Labour)

I understand that everybody who is due to receive a repayment will have been in a public hospital. That represents the overwhelming bulk of those concerned. Therefore, their records will be held by the HSE. An outside body will now have to trawl through those records. It will either ask the HSE for this information, in which case employees of the HSE will have to dig through their records and do the work of this outside agency, or alternatively the body will need to have access to all the records of these hospitals to carry out the work. How will a private body suddenly work from the offices of, say, St. Vincent's Hospital in Athy where my mother is being cared for, as the Minister of State is aware? It is a classic example of a wonderful publicly provided hospital for older people.

This process is about people applying for repayments and their records being checked. Who will do the drudgery of checking the records? If it is to be the HSE, it will do most the work for which another body will be paid. If it is not the HSE, private individuals, who do not know their way around the town of Athy, not to mention St. Vincent's Hospital, will have to be trained in order that they can trawl through the records. That has all sorts of implications for privacy, data protection and other matters.

I increasingly believe that this process has not been thought through. What will happen is that an agency will design and issue a glossy form and when the forms are received, the agency will pass them to the HSE which will have to do the drudgery of finding out whether the applications are valid.