Brendan Ryan (Labour)

Now I know what they are doing. The reason for conflating overpayment and payment procured through fraud or misrepresentation is to use the latter to justify a brutally insensitive method of recovering money. The Minister for State says such people will receive written notification but there is nothing here to indicate that. The HSE and its various agencies have much to learn and are often not models of sensitivity, one need only consider the cases of people refused medical cards. How can we presume that the HSE will deal with these cases sensitively? Why could it not have been explicitly added to the Bill that the HSE "shall write to the individual and ask for his or her comments"? I do not know, but it was not included in the Bill. Instead section 17(2) states:

Where it comes to the knowledge of the Executive that—

(a) all or part of the payment of a prescribed repayment to a person has been procured through fraud or misrepresentation [there is no burden of proof there], or

(b) there has been an overpayment of a prescribed repayment to, or in respect of, a person,

then the amount of that prescribed repayment so procured, or of that overpayment, as the case may be, shall be repayable to the Executive on demand.

We are in very delicate legal territory here. In my view the HSE will receive legal advice to say as little as possible because the more one says the more one is in danger of offering people reasons to go to court. Instead, people will get a brutal one-liner saying they were accidentally overpaid, that they now owe so many thousands of euro and must pay it back immediately. That is what "on demand" means and these words were not chosen accidentally. It is an extraordinarily brutal piece of language.

Fraud and misrepresentation are deliberate deceptions practised by some people which we all condemn. The Bill conflates these issues with overpayment. Overpayment is an error on the part of the super-efficient new private body we are to hear about later in the week which need only tell the HSE if a mistake is made for the HSE to write to the individual demanding repayment.

In my Second Stage speech I said the Tánaiste deserved credit for facing up to this problem when other people had ducked it. As a tail-end to a sorry mess perpetrated by this State against its citizens, section 17 reflects poorly on public administration and governance and I could not withdraw this amendment.